Maranzana at the Italian Cultural Institute
By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, July 29, 2004

From the look of things, young Italian designer Riccardo Maranzana seems to have taken a tip from Wolfgang Laib or local sculptor Mary Early, both of whom favor using fragrant beeswax in their artworks. Maranzana's wall sculptures, which accompany a show of his furniture at the Italian Cultural Institute, are made from small wood cylinders and blocks pressed together and doused in a translucent gold coating with a flat, waxy cast.

Yet Maranzana's works fail the sniff test. Turns out, in fact, that they're coated in a decidedly manufactured ingredient -- glue. The resulting pieces are a somber lot of natural elements embalmed, as if in amber.

You won't find such dour sentiments in Maranzana's furniture, though. In strong contrast to his artworks, his chairs and tables exude an emphatic liveliness. Likely his studies at Pasadena's Art Center College of Design and the Southern California Institute of Architecture honed his design skills. Now in his early thirties, Maranzana's forte is the domestic objects on view here, many shaped into arthropod-like forms. It's as if a troupe of oversize insects found their way inside the gallery. At nighttime, one suspects, they must wander the building's halls.

Both Maranzana's artworks and his furniture engage repetitive shapes. The art references honeycombs and hives by tethering small stumpy cylinders or blocks of wood one to the next. Many of his chairs, too, incorporate repeated elements of shaped plywood held together by metal brackets and pins. A few pieces are made from solid walnut. The base structure of his "Radial Bed" incorporates 16 leg-like arms issuing from a central disc, as if forming a particularly leggy spider. The metal legs of his "movable legs table" emerge from a pod-like torso. Each has a skeletal quality and an arch to the limbs that feel genuinely buggy.

Just metal and wood slats. But the furniture lives. Maranzana suggests that the objects we live with should be as animated as we are. And the artworks on our walls? Those he'd best leave for others to make.

Riccardo Maranzana: Art & Design at the Italian Cultural Institute, 2025 M St., NW, Suite 610, Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., 202-223-9800, to Sept. 17.