Design Luminaries: Davide Groppi
SPOTLIGHT
In addition to heading his eponymous brand, master Italian lighting designer Davide Groppi creates lamps and light fixtures that are evocative--of history, art, literature--and often minimal, but never minimalist.
Enamoured by the chiaroscuro found in renaissance paintings, Groppi believes that darkness is as important as light, and that both serve beauty. Working in Piacenza, a city just southeast of Milan, Groppi's expressive and conceptual approach to lighting design has earned him the Elle Deco International Design Award (Edida), the Design Plus Award, and the ADI Compasso d’Oro.
LightForm: How did you get started in the world of lighting design?
Davide Groppi: I was lucky, because my father taught me to build things, including lamps. The first lamp I assembled with my father, when I was eight or nine years old, was a table lamp with a simple base, stem, and shade. My father, who worked for Enel, the Italian national electronic company, was very good in teaching me how to build things from nothing, and I found the light we made produced emotion in a way that the telegraph machine, and toys (like a pinball machine we made) did not.
Davide Groppi's Simbiosi suspension light appears weightless and almost inconceivable. A deconstructed chandelier, the individual lighting heads hang separately, but remain connected. The very thin red wire that connects them and brings them to life, one in relation to the other, is the principle component of this divine lighting design
LightForm: Have any of your designs drawn their inspiration from an off-the-shelf part you've found?
Davide Groppi: I love ready-mades. My spiritual master is Achille Castiglione. I really love the surrealist approach of using something that already exists and putting it to a different purpose. Sampei, for example, is named for a Japanese cartoon character, a fisherman. I used a fishing rod as inspiration, and the lamp is meant to remind you of a boy fishing on a typical Japanese river.
Sampei Indoor Floor, inspired by the Japanese cartoon character who shares its name
LightForm: How has LED technology influenced the way you design?
Davide Groppi: It lets me be more romantic. Like with Nulla: It’s a tiny dot. It’s very technological, but it results in a very romantic way of lighting. It is surprising lighting; you don’t understand where it is coming from, like a light with no source. I find new technology is going in a more humanistic direction, not only for higher performance. I am going further in this direction, light with no source, magic light.
It looks like a little black circle, as if it had been drawn on the ceiling. For those who are not familiar with Nulla, it might not even appear to be a light.
LightForm: The new Calvino both illuminates and reflects its environment. Is this a concept that resonates in your design philosophy?
Davide Groppi: For the design of Calvino, my inspiration was the painter Michelangelo Pistoletto, who is known for incorporating mirrors and reflections into his work. It is taking the environment around and bringing it into the art piece through mirrors. The name comes from Italo Calvino’s novel, The Invisible Cities, in which there’s a story about a city and a lake that reflects its shape on the lake water, an invisible city. Art is always an inspiration for my designs.
Calvino table light has a circular mirror can be orientated according to what pleases the eye. This enables the illumination around it and at the same time, take in the space around it.
LightForm: Where do you go from here?
Davide Groppi: What I have in mind for the future is a concept of light which is always more rare: the opposite of concentrated. The lamp for me something that is useful less to see than to feel.
Did you know? Davide Groppi's Hashi floor light was a recent finalist for Interior Design's BoY Awards and his new and divinely simple Infinito wall system (pictured with its creator in the featured image above) won the People's Choice Award in Azure's 2018 AZ Awards.
Discover more of Davide Groppi's luminary experiments online or through one of our offices and showrooms in Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Kelowna, and Winnipeg.