From its very first year in 1964, Seletti in Cicognara, Mantova, has followed its principle of professionality service and constant research to strive for betterness innovation and originality. The company focuses on design projects and on creative characteristic Italian excellence.
The collections containing art blended with daily life icons, send a message of shape and function, conveying to its customers a vision for a unique, personal and fun lifestyle. Today Seletti aims at new productions, an ongoing journey within the idea of beauty.
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About the designers
Uto Balmoral
“I don’t belive in design. I belive in ideas”
Uto Balmoral it’s not me.
Uto Balmoral is a character provokingly created to be a product himself,a project of the designer.
The idea comes from a personal consideration about the concept of the ”Designer as a griffe”.
The consciousness rising of this phenomen gave birth, with declared irony, to the new carachter Uto.
Uto traces his own image starting from the denial of himself in a game of particular balances between the will/necessity of appearing and hiding.
The central thread of Uto’s work is the simple necessity to communicate , to provoke, to generate something into the public, to force out a smile, to cause thinking, to spark off a reaction, to start a process able to go over the aesthetical sense and functionality and centering in this the principal scope of his work.
First of all objects are communicating, they are places where you can find a clear message.
CTRLZAK Art & Design Studio
CTRLZAK Art & Design Studio is a multidisciplinary team founded by Thanos Zakopoulos and Katia Meneghini. The studio operates internationally in the field of contemporary art and design with a creative vision which is not limited by a specific framework developing thus work that ranges from product and space design to case specific art projects and installations. With the use of semiotic tools within the creative process the studio proposes forms which surpass common aesthetic values working on a cognitive level. The concept behind each project is to inspire a responsible awareness through the “added value” that art has for society with a special attention to issues of environmental impact.
Marcantonio
Marcantonio, born '76.
He attended the Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts. As soon as he graduated, he began working as a theatrical set designer and collaborating with various architects.
Soon he started to create unique design pieces while working on an Artistic production. Step by step the two careers began to contaminate each other and his design gets enriched with artistic concepts.
Since 2001 he has been realizing sculptures, art objects and design projects.
The connections between Man and Nature are his favorite topic, with his original interpretation of Nature’s dynamics and beauties showing Man’s attitude to alter the original. He learned from Art how an idea can be elegant, which is why he is always looking for pure and synthetic concepts. "I never give up irony, irony is a serious thing. If a good idea is also funny, I can't resist realizing it"
He loves the idea that his job is a continuation of what he used to do when he was a child: to play around with anything he found and to create what his mind imagined. Nowadays, seeking the aesthetic component and the concept, he gets his ideas from the same sources he created when playing as a child, daydreaming with what is usually around him every day.
Giampiero Romanò
Giampiero Romanò, born in 1973, is an art-designer from Milan. His background is not made by design school or arts academies, but rather among nails, hammers and paints in his workshop located in the beating heart of Porta Venezia quarter, where he dedicated himself for more than 20 years to the restoration of antiques and design pieces. Thanks to such experience and extraordinary hand skills, he started a fruitful collaboration with Maurizio Cattelan and Pier Paolo Ferrari’s Toiletpaper Magazine, adding his original and recognizable touch in the display of their famous graphics by producing art pieces exposed in worldwide galleries.
His irony and visionary, along with technical knowledge of the materials and manufacturing skills of a yesteryear master craftsman, pushed him to create one-of-a-kind pieces, among which, stand out spectacular wall mirrors, gathered in the collection ANTICHITA’ 3000, which name well represent the concept of his production, i.e. looking at old things with new eyes by melting the heritage of antiques and the art of the past with a gaze to the future, to the newness, to the never seen before, in order to upset the common esthetical canons and replace them with something new and original.
Studio Job
Studio Job is a ground-breaking art and design studio based in the Netherlands and Milan. Led by Job Smeets (b.1969), a pioneer of contemporary conceptual and sculptural art and design, he founded Studio Job in 1998 in the renaissance spirit, combining traditional and modern techniques to produce once-in-a-lifetime objects. Smeets leads a team of craftspeople to produce art pieces, projects and products with highly a talented team from blacksmiths to painters. The physical studio developed in the Netherlands to work both in the fields of design and art, going on to grow to over 30 people, working with a vast range of high profile clients, galleries, and brands. In the Studio Job atelier, a range of crafts are practiced, where traditional craftspeople such as sculptors and specialists in casting bronze and making stained-glass windows and hand painting, work alongside experts adept in using lasers and 3D printing. In both the atelier and Job’s creative studio, technique, science, design and art come together in their work as examples of what can be described as Gesamtkunstwerk - a total art work or an all embracing art form. Studio Job are pioneers of contemporary conceptual and sculptural design. The results range from bronze artwork in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, to the national stamp of the Netherlands featuring the Dutch King (forty million pieces produced), the unique life-size bronze sculptures on Miami Beach, to the one-off Wunderkammer curiosity cabinetproduced for Swarovski in Innsbruck, Austria.All Studio Job projects are distinguished by a love of detail, freedom of expression, and functional art. With more than 400 exhibitions and solo shows around the world, Studio Job’s work can be found in most important museum collections. Their iconic, heraldic and cartoon-like sculptures are prized by collectors world-wide. Proclaimed one of the most influential studios by the Financial Times, Studio Job are passionate about building up an oeuvre that is becoming increasingly extravagant in its details and increasingly personal. Studio Job work across many areas including art, design, fashion, architecture and interiors having worked with a vast range of high profile clients including sculptures for Gufram, Barneys and Land Rover, set design for Viktor & Rolf and Mika, and product collections for many brands such as Swatch, Alessi, Moooi and Pepsi to name a few. In 2017 Studio Job teamed up with Italian manufacturer Seletti to form the joint brand BLOW producing products in their pop spirit with a radical twist. Inspired by the city, 2019 Job Smeets opened his new base in Porta Venezia, Milan joining the new wave of Italian post-modernists. Job Smeets is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most influential players within design and art. His highly collectable work creates a bridge between object and product by merging functional art with ground-breaking concepts.
Alessandro Zambelli
Alessandro Zambelli studied industrial design and materials engineering at the Cova School of Design in Milan, and his career took off in 2000. After several years in Milan, he chose the Mantua countryside as a place to live and work: a territory rich in history, in references and atmosphere that is a continual inspiration for his work. His approach is characterized by a constant research by the interaction between human being - object - environment and his passion for new technologies and materials. Over the years Alessandro Zambelli has explored various design fields: industrial inventions, manual experimentations, installations, product design, industrial design and creative directions.Different types of approaches that converge in the same design philosophy, where they often intersect with each other, creating solutions with a strong experimental character; they have attained numerous awards, including the European Consumer Choice 2011, the NYIGF Award 2012, the ADI Award for Innovation 2014, the Interior Innovation Award 2015 and the Premio dei Premi 2015, established by the President of the Italian Republic. The designer has exhibited his work in Europe, USA, China, Korea and Japan.