Three ways of seeing Gaetano Pesce, “the undisputed master of new materials”

FIRST, AN EXHIBITION: HUGS AND A HOMECOMING IN THE DESIGNER’S ADOPTED CITY

Gaetano Pesce has called New York home for decades now, but he has not had a show in his adopted city since one at the Museum of Modern Art in 1979. That will be remedied in March with an exhibition that will run through May 25 at the Fred Torres Gallery. The show is entitled L’Abbraccio (The Hug) and includes furniture and designed objects as well as drawings and gouaches and a video. The two signature pieces in the exhibition are both cabinets, one figurative, showing a man and woman hugging, and the second,an homage to the World Trade Center’s twin towers, now almost a dozen years gone, expressed in brilliant saturated colors. The side-by-side cabinets of the latter are joined by a heart. Pesce points out that all eighteen pieces in the show are connected by “a feeling of affection.”

Torres had paid a call to Pesce’s studio earlier this year, and was moved by the work he saw. In turn he conceived an exhibition that would focus on Pesce’s less-known works on paper and revolve around the idea of the hug, or l’abbraccio. “He sees things differently than most people do,” Torres says. Referring to the drawings, he comments, “There’s a whole story in these images— a lot to say in his art, his ‘works for the wall,’ or whatever you might call it. He gets to the core.” From that visit, Torres developed a theme and a storyline for L’Abbraccio. “What Fred is doing is quite important to me,” Pesce says. “I want him to be free to give me a reading of my work that is very different from any other.” Says Torres, “I picked up the spirit in his work.” fredtorres.com