Interview with Patrizia Moroso

By Alessandra Orlandoni - 7 January 2010

Alessandra Orlandoni - Your title could be the ‘Woman of Italian Design’, the woman who saved the family firm by going for creativity and intuition, taking a chance with new names and bypassing the rules of marketing. The process is as important as the result, if not more so.

What’s your story?

Patrizia Moroso - I come from the town of Udine and at the end of the Seventies, when I arrived in Bologna to attend the DAMS Faculty, I got to know a group of Bolognese comic strip artists who called themselves Valvoline. I think it was through a friend of mine, Lorenzo Mattotti, that I got to know Giorgio Carpinteri, Igor Tuveri - nicknamed Igort - and Marcello Jori, who was a painter and artist. Their inspiration was deliberately a mixed bag of references. That was where I learned to love “corrupted things”. Pure things don’t exist; purity is not constructive, and paradise, if it exists, is for times past, and so of no interest at all. I love contamination, interference, intermeshing. In those years, the Bologna scene was vibrant; it was a powerhouse of art, music and fashion. I played the part of the Little Match Girl, rubbing out the drawings for Igort and filling Indian ink pens. There were no computers back then and everything was painstakingly done by hand. Then in the morning when the hero had collapsed into bed, I would leave for Milan with the illustrations, delivering them to Linus and other publishers. Work had to be handed in every month but of course things only got done in the last three nights! It was in this crazy, creative environment that I met Massimo Iosa Ghini, he too a Bolognese illustrator. He was studying architecture in Florence at the time and would always put one of Ettore’s (1*) pieces of furniture in his drawings. At some stage he starting inventing them himself, and became the last bright young talent of Memphis before it closed shop. At that time the Moroso company...