Text by Brecht Gander
Irene Cattaneo’s signature motif is a cloud. What does a cloud look like? Meteorologists have identified ten primary types–but these can be broken down into dozens of “species.” Cirrus clouds–thin, wispy, streaklike–are found above 5,000 meters. The Floccus Cirrus is a Cirrus with a ragged, frayed base. Not to be confused with a Castellanus Cirrus, which has a more castle-like formation. When it comes to clouds, even taxonomists get poetic. Most of us, looking skywards, describe clouds in terms of the non-cloudlike things they resemble–creating an abundance of material for Freu dian analysis (pipes, dragons, mountains...). Since any given cloud can evolve into any other, they exist in a flux of descending, distending, congea ling, reddening, darkening. While clouds appear to be gaseous, they are actually composed of condensation and ice crystals. Just think–above us in the sky–great floating herds of crystals.
The amorphousness, deceptiveness, and molten transformability of clouds make them function, for Irene, as a symbol of her creative practice. Her most si- gnature cloud form is Cumulus–a variety that looks like a fistful of round cotton balls glommed together. Sometimes this form is realized in glass, other times in stone. Glass, like clouds, is difficult to define. Physicists tell us it is not the solid it seems but actually a liquid active on a times pan vaster than human perceptivity. Some millenia from now the glass clouds of Irene’s lamps will form a rain as they slowly melt downwards. Perhaps she was thinking of this when she designed a monumental installation, earlier this year at Samaritaine in Paris, of glass clouds and streamers, resembling a colorful downpour.
Irene established her studio in Venice three years ago, after a peripatetic career in fashion design. She chose Venice for its beauty and also to be wit hin easy reach of the quarries, foundries, and Murano glass studios which form the material spine of her practice. Her process is at once intuitive and thoroughly conside- red. In her titling, she places a strong emphasis on double entendres, puns, and wordplay. For instance,Nuvoletto, the title of her headboard, means “little cloud” in Italian but also contains the word “letto,” meaning “bed.” The reference for Nuvoletto was a headboard Alexander
Calder designed for Peggy Guggenheim’s Venice residence, just a short distance from Irene’s 2024 Venice Biennale installation. This layered ap proach to meaning building, in which historical reference, natural forms, personal symbology, and verbal play are folded into each other, produces a rich amalgamation of signification. This richness plays against an intuitive, spontaneous energy which can best be illustrated by anecdote: when Irene was designing a floor lamp for a collector she decided to include a central column in the form of a tree. Rather than begin modeling clay or beginning to execute detailed sketches, Irene simply walked into the collector’s yard and found a fallen branch from which molds were taken and a bronze cas ting made.
There is a palpable sincerity and earnestness in Irene’s forms. They are striking in the directness of their appeals and the concentrated clarity of their silhouettes, their graphic concision and dramatic compression. These are works that are both desireable and unashamed in wishing to be so. Her work is often imagistic, with a strong delineation of constituent materials and parts.
For instance, in Coup de Foudre, an illuminated travertine thundercloud emits a bronze bolt of lightning which zig-zags down to a basin of polished aluminum, formed to resemble splashing liquid. In this theatrical tripartite design, the stupifying power of lightning is tamed into domestic service–a prop for a heavy, lumi- nous cloud. That the watery metal container functions as a holder for an umbrella adds to the accretion of contradictions. Not only is the cloud heavy and fixed in its form by stone, that most uncloudlike of materials, but it illuminates from within: “I wanted to make a cloud that emitted, rather than blocked it,” the artist says.
