An examination of Gio Ponti’s design sensibility through selected pieces from the April 2025 Auction at Phillips, speaking on the tension between rationalist clarity and ornamental impulse. It engages Ponti’s objects - lamp, sofa, cabinet, writing - as both aesthetic and noetic structures, framing them in relation to concrete poetry, botanical analogy, and spatial intimacy.
Gio Ponti was secular, held paper close to hand and liked blue.
It takes discipline to at once see clearly and yet let glide the unguarded gesture, nevertheless Gio Ponti occupied that exact space between hygienic rigor and naïveté. However, the engineered gentleness supposed to disarm never really disarmed, always held upright by a spine of exacting intention.
To glance from a distance at Gio Ponti's oeuvre is to read a visual referent to Ezra Pound's Cantos; all that was apt from all time periods that were apt, distilled into the barest line.
Lot 3, ‘Rare Floor Lamp’
In blue and light, there stands a lamp reminiscent of Agnes Martin's 'This Rain'.
It is tall, straight and white, rising simply and resolved, its white-brass shaft like the smooth, pale bark of an ascetic aspen; the structural grace of a line more than a mass.
The white is weathered with the patina of photonic degradation on a wall long studied by sun: dull dark whites against pale whites, stable, and mute.
Ponti pursued the rationalism of the post-Bauhaus International Style but deviated on the lean that glass boxes lead to cold thinking. Rather than conforming to the newfound joys of palatable pallor, he remained anchored in the colours of "nativity scenes and sugared almonds" (Ponti, 13). He says:
“Colour is difficult for the weak. To make colour you need blood in your veins and in your brain. That is why tired ages and the refined (the ones tired before the effort), are for soft colours, for pastel colours, for exhausted, exhausted colors. Let them wither.” (Ponti, 12).
In light of the fact that Ponti's studies have been interrupted by his military service in WWI, one can value his distance from monochromatism. It may be argued that his avowal for chromatic serenity becomes valuable when derived from hardship, whereas that same impulse, when bred from simple joie de vivre may not carry the same sincerity.
One of his designs that indulges in colour is found in Two-seater sofa, from Casa Lucano
Lot 12 Two-seater sofa from Gio Ponti’s Casa Lucano, Milan
An object that is polite on the eye and light in line. The folds are so symmetrical that if looked at up-close they resemble a Domenico Gnoli piece.
This piece was designed for the interiors of Casa Lucano, a space with a quaint blend of unlikely factors: Italian metaphysics and French surrealism. The doors fly off the hinges and the Fornisetti wallpaper simulates the disturbing calm of a de Chirico, coaxing the illusion of entrance where there is wall. When excised from its environment, the sofa yet holds onto the artificial sentience of its space. And to know its charge and look at it upon a white wall, is wistful.
Lot 34 Gio Ponti IIlluminated cabinet, from Casa Ceccato, Milan
A cabinet is a grid. A cabinet orders space through division and repetition.
The cabinet is punctuated by three main compartments; some seem to float more than others. The irregularity of the grid does not just segment space, it withholds it.
In Goethe’s botany, the Urpflanze, an archetypal plant was conceived as a single modular form unfolding into endless variation. The cabinet has something of that air: the same rectangular cell, stretched, rotated, filled, left void, an act of architectural morphogenesis.
The cabinet is made out of burr walnut. A "burr" is the unusual, knotted growth that is caused by stress or injury, and gives the wood its swirling patterns.
At Phillips they have glass walls and light floods in, particularly when the sun is out, and when I went in, it was really out. The light nestled inside the walnut's burrs hueing its veining into light green, golden and plum and the pattern looked like the thin nerve filaments of an Egon Schiele contrived posture.
Beneath its wood, a cabinet is a very white almond. To open it is to experience an event of whiteness (Bachelard, 81). The act of opening cabinets reflects how abstractisation takes hold: by separating, holding, arranging. And to pursue on Bachelard's writings in the Poetics of Space, cabinets are veritable organs of the secret psychological life, and without them our intimate life would lack a model of intimacy (Bachelard, 78). A syllogism, if you will: if it is that abstract thought is contingent on the translation of motor experiences into symbolic structures, then might not the act of interacting with such a piece lead to the most elegant model for thinking?
Lot 10 'Villa a Caracas' letter, from Cento Lettere by Gio Ponti
Phillips made a sensitive curatorial gesture, to show not only Ponti's objects of design but his writing as well. The formulaic structure of these letters has the materialist logic of concrete poetry, where meaning is not only inscribed by language, but by the physical format of its delivery. Mallarme, often considered a precursor to this formula, said to Degas: “It is not with ideas that poems are made", "it is with words” (Wall-Romana, 106). In that tenor, the words of Gio Ponti capture the same material variables of the tactile presences that exist next to them.
The indeliberate gesture of the hand that accustomed with the excess of exactness is harder to read than that of the hand known for its naturalism, so all one can do upon these works is to describe what they see.
The paper is light cream and the cellulose thinned. A flower has its stem fixed in a vitreous container that feeds it with clear liquid. It is hard to tell what the words are, but they carry the lucid pellucidity of the water they erect from. Their stemming petals render them herbaceous, as though each letter is moist in the xylemic verdancy of the plant.
1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 78, 81, 83.
Originally published as La poétique de l'espace (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958), translated by Maria Jolas, with a new foreword by John R. Stilgoe.
2. Gio Ponti, Tutto al mondo deve essere coloratissimo (Milan: Henry Beyle, 2013), 12–13.
“Il colore è difficile per i deboli. Per far del colore occorre aver del sangue nelle vene e nel cervello. Per questo le epoche stanche e i signori raffinati (gli «stanchi prima della fatica») sono per i colori tenui, per i colori pastello, per i colori estenuati, sfiatati. Piantiamoli in asso.”
“…dei presepi e dei confetti.”
Translation mine.
3 Wall-Romana, Christophe. "Broodthaers’s Cinepoetic Concretions." In Marcel Broodthaers and Film: A Second of Eternity, 106. 2024. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.17957863.7.
Figure 1.
Agnes Martin, This Rain, 1958. Guggenheim Museum, Audio Guide: Collection Online. https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/agnes-martin-this-rain-1958
Figure 2. Gio Ponti, Rare Floor Lamp. Phillips Auction House, Design, 2025. https://www.phillips.com/detail/gio-ponti/213841
Figure 3. Gio Ponti's Casa di Fantasia door, as featured in The New York Times Style Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/t-magazine/gio-ponti-casa-di-fantasia.html
Figure 4. Gio Ponti, Two-Seater Sofa from Casa Lucano. Phillips Auction House, Design, 2025. https://www.phillips.com/detail/gio-ponti/212797
Figure 5. Domenico Gnoli, installation view, Luxembourg & Dayan. Contemporary Art Library. https://www.contemporaryartlibrary.org/project/domenico-gnoli-at-luxembourg-dayan-7223/23
Figure 6. Gio Ponti, Illuminated Cabinet. Phillips Auction House, Design, 2025. https://www.phillips.com/detail/gio-ponti/217835
Figure 7. Untitled wood surface, photographed by the author at Phillips, pre-auction viewing, Spring 2025.
Figure 8. Egon Schiele, as reproduced on page 173 of Esther Selsdon, Egon Schiele (Kent, UK: Grange Books, 2005).
Figure 9 Gio Ponti, Villa a Caracas Letter. Phillips Auction House, Design, 2025. https://www.phillips.com/detail/gio-ponti/214384
Figure 10. René Magritte, La femme du maçon, as photographed by author at Christie’s Surrealist Art Auction, March 2025.
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