Luck and Sex. That’s all. A Retrospective of Paolo Pallucco.

Luck and Sex. That’s all. is the first retrospective of Italian designer Paolo Pallucco presented by Paul Bourdet, Stefan Cosma and Ketabi Projects. On now in Paris, the exhibition showcases an exceptional collection of some forty pieces designed by Paolo Pallucco, Mireille Rivier, Rei Kawakubo, and other designers issued by Pallucco collected over the last two years, as it retraces the footsteps of the man himself.

Born in Rome in 1950 and originally trained as an architect, Paolo Pallucco was a radical and committed designer of the 1980s, both in terms of the pieces he produced and his colourful personality. He began his eponymous company in 1980 with the objective of re-editioning forgotten creations from the first half of the 20th Century such as the Fortuny floor lamp, the chair by Robert Mallet-Stevens and the Sandows chair by René Herbst.

With industrial production at his disposal Pallucco springboards to his own radical creations of mostly unmatched quality. Since the furniture is so well produced he began to add more or less absurd functions—industrial elements linked to the world of the machine that in turn referenced the Modernist’s search for absolute functionalism and economy of means to the detriment of aesthetics or comfort.

His pieces integrated many references to warfare from the coffee table Tankette of 1987 evoking the chains of a tank, the armchair Barba d’Argento in 1986 that recalled a machine gun to the Bocca da Fuoco coat rack of 1987 that exhibited as a kind of cannon in full explosion. Yet warfare is not the only thing you’ll find throughout his work, the designer was also deeply affected by the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, cinema, photography and the omnipresence of Catholicism within the collective European continent.

Frequent collaborators include his wife Mireille Rivier, a designer herself who was the pragmatist yin to his dreamer yang, Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo and Peter Lindbergh the brand’s photographer.

The exhibition will be held at Ketabi Projects in Paris until March 20th—not one to be missed if you happen to be in town.

Related: Koenraad Dedobbeleer at Maniera Gallery Brussels.

[Images courtesy of Paul Bourdet Fine Furniture, Ketabi Projects and Eclettico Studio. Photography by Studio Shapiro.]