Fabio Novembre at The Triennale Design Museum

Fabio Novembre says "drawing a rainbow to connect Heaven and Earth in that constant state of human balance we maintain with our feet in the mud and head up in the stars." Novembre's quote is the defining concept for his new exhibition at Milan's Triennale Design Museum. The "rainbow" is an artistic metaphor for an "intangible pathway " from Heaven to Earth, which is represented in the colorful exhibition. Novembre explained that creating the exhibition "involved exhibiting something absolutely new compared to previous editions, a selection of carefully chosen items confirming the theory that there is only one Italian school of graphics," continuing on to explain "even though it has no proper structure, hardly surprising since the same could be said about everything connected with our dear old unpredictable country." Novembre was asked to add a third dimension to graphics - which are almost always two dimensional. The third dimension came in the form of a built space: full of color and divided into nine sections consisting of books, letters, magazines, culture and politics, packaging, advertising, visual identity, video and signposting. The clever designer imagined the space as a blank book, then decided to introduce the color spectrum to the empty white pages. "using color as an authentic graphic hypertext to support material, which, nevertheless, require more complex codes in order to be fully interpreted." There's some food for thought for ya!

(Photography: Fabio Novembre)