Being truly radical means rejecting any preconception, embracing recklessness and irony in the face of norms and tradition. The nature of radical design elects incoherence as process, reflected in the incoherent forms, in the unexpected inspiration, in the independence of volumes.
The Shadow armchair embodies these principles; it emancipates itself from the need of a predefined structure, it grows in a radically unregulated way and changes in relation only to the body it mimics.
The name, chosen by designer Gaetano Pesce for this creation for Meritalia®, evokes both absence and presence: the absence of a body and presence of its memory, its imprint. The armchair is a single volume: the padding, clad in malleable materials, is happily unstable, fluid and magmatic. It thickens, but without ever really settling.
Shadow is moldless. The result of a manufacturing process developed and perfected by Meritalia®: the armchair is shaped with the injection of polyurethane foam, expanding and solidifying unpredictably. The making of the armchair – the craft, from cutting the upholstery fabric down to the finishings and details – is only complete when the armchair meets a body, whose heat and weight shape its final volume. The process, mostly by hand, makes each Shadow different from the others – its details underline its uniqueness.
Sitting on Shadow means letting yourself be enveloped by a shape and at the same time imprinting that of your own body – it is an armchair that has memory, capable of keeping track of the experience of using it. A physical imprint that becomes a declaration of identity: furnishing a space with Shadow means appropriating it, projecting your own shadow and fixing it on an object that is both everyday and extraordinary.
