Decontextualize: this is Piero Gilardi’s mantra. Recreate the bucolic atmosphere of a mountain river or the ocean cliffs inside the domestic space - this was his aim: to empty the weight of an object, but let its image - rather its artificial reproduction - keep the poetry and the evocative simplicity from which these objects come alive for the user.
And the so the series Sassi is born. Sedilsasso, the biggest rock - to be used as a chair - comes with two more pebbles of smaller proportions, which go together to recreate for all purposes a natural contemplative set.
It was the first Gufram project to play on the juxtaposition of the concepts light, heavy and natural, artificial
Sassi, artificially natural, are an oxymoron, a vision of design that demolishes and subverts the proved parameters of tactile and visual perception. Same skin, same volume, same tones, same roughness, same outer layer of natural stones, but different substance and weight, that turn them into innocuous boulders; freed from gravity and light, they rise to a new life.
In the scenic design of the living space they become a soft seating system - an innocent deceit able to create a short-circuit between usage and end use, between reality and fiction. The meaning itself of the product is multiplied and strengthened exponentially by addition and accumulation.