Caimi Snowsound Art: Alessandro Mendini continues the dialogue between design and art

Caimi Snowsound is a well-established, successful company with an international reputation as a provider of solutions to problems of noise pollution in all sorts of environments, both public and private. Caimi’s products combine top technical performance with functionality and design, and are developed with strict regard to their environmental impact.

To develop its Snowsound technology, the company vastly expanded the boundaries of its research and experimentation in pursuance of its perpetual commitment to exploring new avenues and embarking on new projects that stand out for their combination of technology, industrial design and art. Inspired by this business model, Caimi went on to create and develop Snowsound Art, a project that for the last four years has, in its own unique and particular way, mapped out a path to dialogue between industrial design and art.

The guiding idea is that not only unique and unrepeatable works should qualify as art, but that a work of art, being an expression of universal beauty, should be reproducible on serially produced objects.

Sound-absorbing panels can therefore take on a new aesthetic function: instead of serving simply as practical objects, they can become works of art for the enjoyment of all.

The collection has now been enriched by the arrival of Alessandro Mendini, who joins Gio Ponti and Gillo Dorfles. Caimi is rolling out a set of new panels built to designs by Alessandro Mendini that the company, with the collaboration of Studio Mendini and, in particular, Alessandro’s daughters Fulvia and Elisa, carefully selected from among the countless number produced by the artist's creative genius.

The lines in the artwork are sharply delineated but not rigid; the colour palette captures the attention of the eye; the depicted animals have a lifelike presence, and seem almost capable of talking to us. This short series of pieces epitomizes the full expressive power of Alessandro Mendini and his boundless poetic and aesthetic spirit.

The new collection is presented with illustrations in a catalogue-booklet entitled Alessandro Mendini, le idee e le cose, ‘Alessandro Mendini, ideas and things’, edited by Aldo Colonetti, a journalist and scholar of  design philosophy.     

With this expansion of the Snowsound Art collection, Caimi is giving material proof of the validity of the idea that the coexistence and fusion of art and industrial design can add beauty to function and make our daily lives more pleasant.