Cooling Art

How humble fridges are turning into the pieces of art…

As they say, the kitchen is like a theatre, where we can see the acts of meal preparation, the dramas about over salting and the love stories with the favourite cakes… My aunt is sure that the most interesting talks are also in the kitchen! We are spending a lot of time in places we like, and the kitchen, due to this fresh approach, can be even more attractive. Imagination creates reality, as Wagner believed, so if cookery reaches the level of art, why can’t ordinary kitchen items be the artworks? The Italian retro design SMEG thinks so as well and joins its creative forces with luxury brand Dolce & Gabbana to produce a bespoke collection of FAB28. Maybe it’s the shortened version of „fabulous”, I don’t know, but the fruits of such cooperation are fabulous for sure! The collection of hand painted refrigerators is quite limited, just a hundred pieces, but each of them took no less than two hundred and forty hours of work and costs thirty-four thousand dollars. The pictures presented on the „ice-cold canvases” were inspired by traditional scenes from the mediaeval period of Italian and especially Sicilian history, and are due to the colours and floral motives connected to Spring-Summer Collection 2016 by Dolce & Gabbana. Every kitchen will gain a new, chic, rich and colourful accent by (though just a fridge) an extraordinary piece of art.

The group of artists working on the project is also quite limited. It consists of Salvatore Sapienza, who has been restoring and decorating Sicilian carts since his teenager years; family duo Adriana Zambonelli and Tiziana Nicosia, whose artworks from Catania’s shop have been shown all over the world; Sebastiano Patania, whose family has been making the traditional Sicilian puppets for over 40 years; and Alice Valenti, who is the only woman among the very few painters of carts to succeed in this ancient and sophisticated decorative art. There are also brothers Giuseppe and Antonio Bevilacqua with artists Biagio Castilletti and Damiano Rotella, who have been working together for over ten years. All of them were creating under the artistic direction of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. “

„These are really the perfect collector’s pieces,” says Gabbana describing the project for Vogue. „And even though our companies are in different sectors, there are still similarities, like a passion for creativity and innovation, attention to quality and details, and, of course, a love of Italy and Italian-made products.”

FAB28 isn’t the first artistic collection of SMEG refrigerators. Two years ago, the Italian brand in collaboration with Grolsch and thirteen South African artists created the collection FAB10. It was made with a totally different approach: Every fridge was completed in the style of the artist who was painting it. These works are also worth a look. But not only SMEG is trying to transform the „humble” curvy fridges into something extraordinary. In Australia, they celebrate the Darwin Fridge Festival, an event with a strong environmental focus. There is also Cuban Refrigerator Art, which utilised old reefers as the base for great art pieces, and now these 50 fridges are the part of Cuban cultural heritage.

It’s difficult not to agree with Picasso, who said, „There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who, with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into sun.”