Il Cestello restaurant, Florence Wright, Chicago, "Important Design," June 2, 2009, lot 124 Private collection, acquired from the above
Catalogue Essay
In 2003, Italian designer Gaetano Pesce designed the interiors of Il Cestello, a restaurant in Florence, Italy. Like pieces of drying laundry, the present wall lights hung from a metal bar along the walls of the restaurant. Pesce created the lights by coating pieces of fabric—from a negligee to a pair of baseball knickerbockers to a t-shirt—with resin and then backlighting them. Though the lights were arranged in a row, each piece of clothing is a discrete light, and they can be arranged in various compositions. Like much of Pesce’s work, there is a playfulness to the wall light’s design as well as a completely unexpected and novel use of materials and forms.
