Paolo pallucco & mireille rivier
Paolo Pallucco & Mireille Rivier are a design duo known for their particularly brutal and radical furniture.
Their creations are driven by a unique vision of furniture, blending elements of sculptural artwork with irrational objects.
Originally a publisher before becoming a designer, Paolo Pallucco founded the company Pallucco Roma in the early 1980s, specializing in reissuing furniture from the 1900–1930 period. By the mid-1980s, Pallucco began sketching his own designs, taking on the role of a boundless dreamer-artist with a decidedly radical style. His furniture would be “Duro, Semplice e Chiaro” (Hard, Simple, and Clear), a formula inspired by Tohji Murata, Artistic Director of Comme des Garçons. Mireille Rivier, on the other hand, rationalized the production process and focused on proportions and technical aspects of the creations. Their partnership endowed their work with an exceptional level of craftsmanship. While the tripod chair Stalker STK1 is heavy and solid, the Tankette table is utterly unshakable.
Paolo Pallucco constantly challenged the binary notion of furniture being “beautiful and useful,” making it instead “austere and unbalanced,” both in its symmetry and in its function. He also played with the classical architecture of furniture, dividing or multiplying the legs of what is considered the purest expression of furniture: the chair. Ever-protean, the chair is explored in 100 different ways in his final series 100 Sedie in una Notte.
Victims of their own avant-garde vision, the furniture of Paolo Pallucco & Mireille Rivier failed to find a wide audience amid the excess of the 1980s. Mostly producing on commission, some of their pieces rarely progressed beyond the prototype stage.
Discover the captivating work of Paolo Pallucco & Mireille Rivier — a disruptive and fascinating duo. Surely too far ahead of their time, their work could not be more relevant today.
