Iconoclastic, the designer ceramic that reworks cult objects and mythological figures

It is called Iconoclastic and it is a project that reworks a classic of Italian artisan culture such as porcelain and reinvents it according to forms and icons belonging to the contemporary world. Authors of the project are the two creative founders of Daamstudio, a design studio from Veneto that has been working for several years both in Italy and abroad. In Iconoclastic they wanted to pour the experience gained over the years as brand designers & art directors for creative and cultural industries, and transport their visual imagery into a collection of symbolic objects, shaped by a reality that has been operating for decades in the field of artistic porcelain and therefore a spokesperson for high Italian craftsmanship.

Iconoclastic reworks stimuli from fashion, music, and contemporary visual culture in general, modeling them on a classical basis. The pieces, which are all handcrafted, require workmanship adjusted to the needs of the raw material and the rhythms of man, not machines. Moreover, production is made to order and in limited runs, so as not to overload a market already saturated with products. “We want to imagine that whoever buys an Iconoclastic piece,” say the project’s creators, “is aware of these values and takes them on in turn, with a view to contributing, through conscious buying, to making this world a better place.”

The project is also developed with respect for the environment, starting with the raw material: clay. A poor and noble material at the same time, a pure fruit of the earth that, thanks to water first and then fire, is shaped and stabilized into a precious but fragile solid element. There are no polluting interferences in this process: only the skilled hands of artisans who first mold the kaolin, then bake it by means of the plaster mold and finally paint it with natural pigments. It is an ancient process, dating back to the origins of man, perfected around the 18th century with the various ceramic schools and handed down from generation to generation-that is why only skilled artisan workshops can tackle this process. So Iconoclastic has chosen to entrust the making of its objects to a company specializing in the production of Capodimonte porcelain and, specifically, to the hands of sculptor Luciano Cazzola, who has 50 years of experience in the field. A reality embedded in the artisanal fabric of the Nove (Vicenza) area, specializing in ceramic production. For the founders of the project, it is a way to strengthen local entrepreneurship and perpetuate traditions otherwise destined to dissolve in the innovative fury of the times.

The last requirement in the view of a sustainable ethic is the role of time: “In this frenetic age of frenzied production, we pride ourselves on creating slow objects,” say the creators of Iconoclastic, “where the waiting time for their realization is an added value and not a discriminating factor. Each piece in fact requires adequate processing adjusted to the needs of the raw material and the rhythms of man, not machines. Moreover, production is made to order and in limited runs, so as not to overload a market already saturated with products. Slow objects, because each piece is desired and expected.”

Thereare two collections: Icons and Muse. Icons reworks one of the fetishes of contemporary street culture, the sneaker, and crystallizes it into a porcelain object. By now risen to the role of cult object among both young people and collectors of all ages, made an absolute protagonist by marketing through complex co-branding operations between fashion houses, the Iconoclastic sneaker stripped of its real function aspires to become a pure object of devotion. It is offered in different variants, a tribute to symbols or visual expressions of contemporary pop culture, and lends itself to take on ever-new guises, as in a real collection that is always work in progress. For this reason, each sneaker is numbered and made in a limited edition.

Muse, on the other hand, is a collection of porcelain ladies who are inspired by the mythological figure of the muses and reworks it with symbolic codes to aim at creating “a new feminine archetype, ideal and magical,” as the creators of Iconoclastic put it. The Muses, since archaic Greece, have represented the supreme ideal of Art understood as the “manifestation of the divine.” Usually identified as nine distinct figures, each of them is a spokesperson for a very specific art so as to include all fields of human knowledge: from poetry to dance, from art to science. The Muse collection reworks these mythological figures with a stylistic language that takes cues from contemporary arts and design and blends them with topical elements. Urania, Terpsichore and Thalia, are the first three “ideal” ladies, each loaded with symbolism and visual references to decode, decorative chimeras but with aspirations to become contemporary “icons.” The collection is entirely hand-carved by a master sculptor to exclusive designs by Iconoclastic’s designers, the pieces individually decorated with a mix of painting and graphic techniques, numbered and produced in limited editions.

For all information you can visit Iconoclastic’s website.

Iconoclastic, the designer ceramic that reworks cult objects and mythological figures

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