Pair of wall sconces made of metal, brass, and perspex, produced in the 1950s by Arredoluce, designed by Angelo Lelii.
These are two small globes suspended on the wall, where the polished brass surface gives way to small, round, and bulging diffusers made of white perspex. The design is unusual, with a strong imaginative power. The 1950s, just after the world conflicts, saw industry and commerce experiencing a new surge. Research once again focused on the civilian and social market. On March 11, 1954, Italian chemical engineer Giulio Natta synthesized a highly ordered organic compound in his lab, which he did not yet know would win him a Nobel Prize a few years later. This compound was isotactic polypropylene, a term too complex for the average housewife to easily pronounce, smelling too much of the laboratory. When it was renamed Moplain, it achieved incredible commercial success.
New materials were entering the market, and old patents were finding new life. Polymethyl methacrylate, invented by scientist Otto Karl Julius Röhm and produced in his German factories since 1933, was now renamed the more reassuring "Perspex." Freed from wartime needs, this acrylic glass transitioned from bomber cockpit windows to the more peaceful lampshades of bourgeois apartment lamps. Fashion and design were not immune to these influences, and plastic materials, studied for their aesthetic potential, became the protagonists of bold projects and entered homes with force. This was also thanks to prominent figures who served as a bridge between the past and the present, with a clear vision of the future. One such figure was Angelo Lelii. Born in 1915, when the few cars on the road still dangerously resembled horseless carriages, he successfully interpreted the best ideas of his time throughout his career. His intuitive, subtle, and ironic elegance can be found in every one of his projects. The baroque-bourgeois sinuosity of the early 1940s, where brass and metal stems embraced delicate opaline shades, gave way to more decisive and provocative lines as society evolved.
In an open dialogue between fashion and desire, Lelii and Arredoluce—his commercial venture of which he was the administrator—helped shape and educate the taste of a certain audience that was sensitive to trends but needed to recognize themselves in an educated aesthetic consumption. As a forerunner of what was to come, between the 1950s and 1960s, Arredoluce's production under Lelii increasingly moved away from the familiar and recognizable forms of the object/lamp towards a more conceptual light installation. A clear geometry prevailed, with angular solids dialoguing with organic and fluid lines. The purpose of illumination united these daringly juxtaposed forms; when switched on, the light continued to furnish the contemporary home. This was also thanks to Perspex, from the Latin "perspicio," meaning "I see through." The design eye remains vigilant, seeing through the future and the ages.
In excellent general condition with a beautiful patina on the brass.
Dimensions: 14 x 14 x 19 cm
