Milan (MI), Italy
The Venusia Collection by Elena Salmistraro for Alessi gets its name from a variant of the name Venus, goddess of beauty, and recalls the bond between human beings and ornamental elements through different goldsmith techniques.
Ancestral and industrial, figurative and abstract, gold and black… In conceiving the Venusia collection, Elena Salmistraro creates an imaginary world in which the contrast of textures, colors, and geometries is enhanced by precious Italian workmanship.
It is as if the designer were using the jewel for its very essence, a play in constant balance between the sacred and the profane.
For its inspired design, Venusia has recently been awarded a 2022 Good Design Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The designer develops her research by following five “expressive strands” with evocative names – Acta, Fresia, Edone, Trama and Lorica – within which she explores different metal processes: from Etruscan granulation to deep-drawing, from laser cutting to calendering.
“Venusia is a variant of the name Venus, goddess of beauty. It recalls the close link between human beings and ornamental elements for the body, whose very beauty becomes an element of ‘shielding and protection.’ This is a bond that has always existed and is linked to religions, rituals, or the aesthetic taste of the individual,” states Elena Salmistraro.
She seeks to do it in her own way, of course, mixing the sacred and the profane, simplicity and complexity, the richness of the jewel with the roughness of the material, and the obvious formal modernity with primitive references.
The decoration obtained with a succession of dots reinterprets one of the oldest and most fascinating goldsmith techniques, Etruscan granulation, in an industrial key.
This refined process consists in soldering tiny spheres of gold or silver on a metal sheet.
“Thanks to its rich interaction with light, the aesthetic paradigm of granulation becomes a sort of luminous skin: the jewels almost become magical objects,” the designer concludes.
Project: Venusia
Designer: Alessi SpA
Lead Designer: Elena Salmistraro
Manufacturer: Alessi SpA
