ODETTE CONSOLLE WITH CALACATTA MARBLE TOP. PHOTOS BY MARIO CIAMPI

Odette is a console table characterized by light and slender shapes. It is complemented by its alter ego Odile, a series of generously-sized living room tables that echo its fluid language and constructive logic. In these pieces, which inherit from the Oblique storage units that are complementary to them part of the formal language, it is rhythm that is the protagonist: as in a classical ballet, it seems that these pieces can hover in the air lifting themselves on tiptoe as if they were ballerinas with light and harmonious movements.

Each element has been designed pursuing this idea of lightness, visual but also and above all technical lightness: the elliptical sections of the wood have been reduced to a minimum, the legs tapered with delicate transitions, the crossbars tapered and thinned. The top is made of bronzed glass flush with the wood, while the marble tops have been designed and worked to become 6mm thick sheets of stone.

From this oneiric inspiration of dance, the names Odile and Odette echo the antithesis in the two personalities of the protagonist of The Swan Lake. On one side Odette, the ethereal and delicate console, on the other side Odile, the small tables, more daring and exuberant. As in the Opera, two souls in perpetual contrast coexist in this collection: on the one hand the strong contemporary, rational and synthetic value of clean form, on the other the memory of tradition, the wood worked in the Italian way, the sinuous and refined transitions that winks at the masters of the past.

IRINA KOLESNIKOVA AS ‘ODETTE’ IN THE SWAN LAKE, ST PETERSBURG BALLET. PHOTO BY VLADIMIR ZENZINOV, 2015

LETTERA DI GIO’ PONTI A UMBERTO CASSINA, 1953. ARCHIVIO STORICO CASSINA