Original design armchair POLTRONA

polyurethaneby Alessandro Mendini

Gufram and Alessandro Mendini met for the first time in 1974, when the designer was the director of the magazine Casabella. Mendini had an idea for the cover of the November issue and contacted Gufram to make it: the resuit was an indoor space made of white walls and shiny parquet flooring and the image of a barefooted woman with a blue jumpsuit who was sitting on an austere and oversize grave. The block, realized in fake granité, almost 3 meters tall and designed by Mendini, was created by Gufram. After 40 years the collaboration with Mendini restarted in 2014 and gave life to Poltrona. A totemic and symbolic seat, Poltrona is a domestic throne that lives of the contrast between the lightness of polyuréthane and the "true-fake" Carrara marble finish: an optical illusion, a tactile short-circuit that is possible only thanks to Guflac, the particular paint patented by Gufram that makes it possible to make polyuréthane look like leather while maintaining its flexibility and softness. A piece of furniture of cyclopic dimensions - 153 cm large, 130 long and 80 cm high - Poltrona is decorated entirely by hand and only the expérience of Gufram's artisans can create a finish that is perfectly similar to real marble, even if it weighs only 50 Kg. On display on the occasion of the two rétrospectives dedicated to Mandini in Korea, Poltrona looked so real as to hâve fooled a Korean hauler, who, at the end of one of the exhibits, refused to transport it, thinking it was made of real stone.