“…the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work…it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair…. Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions.”
In this way, in 1967’s ”Sentences on Conceptual Art”, Sol Lewitt describes very well a process that we share when we begin a new project and try to focus the idea that will be the basis of all future evolution.
For the greatest part of our projects the first conceptual sketch contains and resumes the element that will appear in the final picture of the built work as the essence or the concept of it.
Another artist, Boetti in 1974 writing about his embroidered maps, helps us in defining a further step,: “ For me the Embroidered Map is the height of beauty. I didn’t do anything for that work. I didn’t choose anything in the sense that: the world is made the way it is and I was not the one who designed it, the flags are what they are and I did not design them, in short I did absolutely nothing at all; when the basic idea, the concept, comes forth there is nothing left to choose.”
Boetti describes the attitude of taking this conceptual intention to deal with reality as it is, minimizing the “artistic” and “personal” intervention to the expression of a relationship between existing elements.
A similar attitude is constant in our work. Even if a design intervention is needed and objects are not found already existing in reality, this attitude consists in avoiding all the sculptural, pictoresque, over-designed effects and going to the user’s mind.
It is not by chance that two artists can help us so much in defining our work.
As a matter of facts, architecture, like art did some decades in advance, lost support and certitudes deriving from traditions.
In their place we have circumstancially to put concepts that, if not in intentions at least in subsequent and detached overlook , seem to tend to some kind of general and substancial answer.