Biography
Fortunato D’Amico
THE ALCHEMY OF CRAFTING AND THE RESTLESSNESS OF FORM
Franco Perrotti is not easily defined. His work is a hybridization of at least three disciplines: design, art, and craftsmanship. It is an alchemy of crafting that transcends simple classifications and merges with visual poetry, the matrix of all intuitions that make each creative gesture a unique and unrepeatable act, where imagination blends with matter and gives life to new expressive forms capable of surprising and engaging the viewer. This mixture is not accidental but constitutes the very core of his poetics. His artistic production, consisting of polyurethane chairs, stucco sideboards, and cabinets with golden fractures, is a reflection on the very nature of design and its relationship with art and craftsmanship. Perrotti’s objects are texts, intentional errors, prostheses of the domestic and environmental unconscious, the result of a complex and layered creative process, rich in implicit meanings. Their appearance reveals to the world the wounds of a rhetoric of form originated from capital sins to be reevaluated, as they reflect the complexity of the human and the desire for redemption, transforming guilt into awareness and transgression into fertile ground for a renewed dialogue between ethics and aesthetics. Everything is designed to unsettle comfort, to give voice back to the body, desire, irony, and soul.
The choice of materials, often unusual and unconventional, contributes to creating an effect of estrangement, of unease. The beauty of his creations is not the reassuring and seductive one of mainstream design, but it is rough, visceral, requiring active participation from the observer; it is a work to be discovered and traversed with slowness and curiosity. After working alongside some of the most prestigious design brands, Tecno, Poltrona Frau, Moroso, Faram, Airon, Franco Perrotti founded, near Chieti, the city where he was born, thus far from Milan, Paris, London, his experimental workshop: Rude Bravo. An act of rebellion, a challenge to the status quo that characterizes his work along with that of some of his fellow travelers, Mario Mariano and Tanino Liberatore.
Franco Perrotti (Abruzzo, 1953) trained in Milan, where he began his
career in design with the Perrotti Dissociati brand, collaborating
with companies such as Tecno, Poltrona Frau, Moroso, Faram, and Airon. His
research hybridizes art, design, and craftsmanship, giving life to objects,
installations, and sculptures in which function and narrative, design rigor,
and poetic imagination intertwine.
In 1997, in Abruzzo, he launched the Rude Bravo experimental laboratory
with Mario Mariano and Tanino Liberatore, intended as a workshop where the
project breaks free from market logic to become a critical gesture
and a practice of shared imagination. Following the ten-year experience
of Rude Bravo, Franco began working consistently
on artistic installation projects and exhibitions.
In 2019, he was invited to the Photology Air international exhibition in
Noto, where he presented the first Dissuader, a metaphor embodied
by a giant, allegorical pigeon that became an emblem of the
complex relationship between human beings, as well as between man and the
natural environment. It was here that Franco Perrotti combined the
management of design project criteria within a work of art.
In 2024, he arrived at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai with the exhibition
Dissuader – Art and Design by Franco Perrotti on the occasion of
Dubai Design Week and Dubai Art Week. The large pigeons become
symbolic and political devices addressing the themes of borders and
migration.
In 2025, the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan will host the major
monographic exhibition Franco Perrotti – When I Was A Designer, curated by
Fortunato D’Amico, which retraces fifty years of activity, highlighting
the transition from design to art and the progressive dissolution
of disciplinary boundaries.