Poltronova - Gae Aulenti - Armchair - metal tubular chair - Painted steel

The white Locus Solus armchair. The name of the series derives from the eponymous book by Raymond Roussel, a French writer, playwright and poet who lived at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, considered one of the spiritual fathers of Patafisics (Pataphysics), often defined as “the logic of the absurd,” a science that aims to study the particular and the exceptions and to explain the universe supplementary to ours.
A few years after the publication of Raymond Roussel’s book, Gae Aulenti designed this series of garden furniture for Poltronova in collaboration with students from the Pistoia School of Art. For this project the artist drew inspiration from the woodwork of the Sgarsul chair, emblem of the Neoliberty style, reinterpreting it in a pop key and exploring the linguistic potentials related to a departure from the strictures of functionalism. Thus she designed a collection that is a parody of all those tubular-furniture pieces produced in the 1960s, creating sinuous, refined shapes that brush against one another within all the elements of the series.
They were subsequently produced by Zanotta and later acquired by Exteta. The elements of the series are: an armchair, a chair, a table, an orientable lamp, a small sofa, a sun lounger and a bench.
The collection also appears in the film La piscina (The Pool) of 1969 directed by Jacques Deray.