Project

Le Vitamine

Activities: Art direction e Product Design.
Concept design for a new wall furnishing collection.
Product designers, graphic designer studio and PR agency selection and management.
Product design: Vitamina C. Exhibition design and management.

TESTO TRATTO DAL CATALOGO

These great energy boosters for interiors, Vitamine, are a new take on decorative wall furnishings. Valentina Downey asked different women designers to interpret her idea of creating an innova-tive collection based on graphic composition and color that would result in wall sculptures with a strong decorative style. In debates on design, decoration has long been considered incompatible with functionality and essentiality for its lack of cruciality and its superfluous nature. With Vitamine, an effort to reconcile these seemingly opposite elements appears to have succeeded. In focusing their talent on adornment, the designers have demonstrated clearly that there is no contradiction between function and decoration. Their projects open a new path to a territory that has yet remained unexplored, with enormous potential and ignored by the design world until now; it is a theme that is still wide-open for invention. And it’s true that, aside from original works of art which are for the select few, the market offers very little in quality decorative wall furnishings despite the fact that these are accessories that lend character and personality to an interior. For now there are four Vitamine, made by four women designers from four different European countries: Spain, Iceland, Italy and Germany. The projects reflect their cultural diversity in an exemplary way and give us an unusual perspective of the feminine touch. The projects’ diversity, connected by the use of the expressive language of modern design and its history, contributes to making the collection a rich and variegated one, where each of us will be able to find an element that perfectly suits his or her own interior. The common denominators are color and a predilection for simple geometric lines and shapes. “Vitamina A” is by the Spanish-born Gala Carlota Fernandez Montero. Her decorative system is made up of parts that can be combined in different ways. Fernandez’s cultural references are Arabian culture and the Renaissance. The modular parts of her wall-mounted ornament are based on the mathematical perfection of the golden section. This formula inspired her to create a con-trolled system of elements, and its juxtaposition of different colors results in an expressive wall hanging of great graphic and chromatic impact. “Vitamina B” is by Anna Lovisa, partner of Hugvit & Honnun, a young Icelandic design studio. Her project is based on typically clean Scandinavian lines and functionality. In an array of different combinations, a sliding bar is affixed with square and rectangular geometric elements that can hold all types of pictures. This project’s essentiality is combined with flexibility, and its infinite variation possibilities make it a valuable tool in interior personalization. “Vitamina C” is a project of decorative elements by the Irish-Italian designer Valentina Downey, who is also the creator behind the Vitamine collection. Here, shapes and geometry are pure and minimal; the colors are basic: white, red, gray, black. The project’s crisp and resolute graphic quality is almost a Zen abstraction, making the walls transmit a message of peace and harmony. “Vitamina D” by German-born Angelika Mörlein is made up of a series of modules with different graphic patterns and colors. They interact with a sliding element and a mirror, resulting in vary-ing compositions and visual effects. There is interest in its specific kind of flexibility of use: the different subjects are interchangeable within a rigid system of prefixed elements, making the resulting aesthetic most effective.

These Vitamine are fundamental substances for our wellbeing - they are the beneficial pills for our minds and our surroundings.

Patrizia Scarzella