Florencia Martinez

On the occasion of the Salone del Mobile 2019, Florencia Martinez presents a site-specific project, titled Happiness, designed specifically for the tiny, but valuable upper floor at Gilda Contemporary Art headquarter.

The Argentine artist experiments art design, looking at the figure of Marie Antoinette, the questionable and often contested last Queen of France.
Marie Antoinette got married when she was only fourteen and was really young when she became queen: Florencia Martinez is so curious about her, captures some aspects of her life that makes this historical figure less wicked and cynical than is widely assumed. The 16-year-old queen Marie Antoinette tried to find her own personal style, in order to appear worthy of respect and reverence. For her, incredible hair styles such as poufs, up to three feet (90 cm) high, were created, put upon a metal framework with padding, flowers, fresh fruit and even stuffed animals.
The artist is almost soft for Marie Antoinette's will to appear and to cast herself free from her queen role, for her cloaked emotional frailty, a clear sign of uncertainty. At the same time, Florencia Martinez sees a similarity with behaviour that goes beyond the specific historical background and concerns femininity at large, up to the present days.
Few people know that Maria Antoinette's hair styles were designed especially for her by her talented hairstylist, and that later her hair styles became the current fashion under the name of pouf de sentiment, since the hairdressers aimed at interpreting the woman's feelings and each style was inspired end designed on a woman, according to her mood and her personality. Years later, the piece of furniture called pouf was named after Marie Antoinette's hair styles.
The colourful seats designed by Florencia Martinez boast a palette of complementary colours that unexpectedly meet primary colours. They are first of all pieces of furniture, but they bear the artist's mark, as they are made of small colorful fabric bundles tied with strings, a distinctive feature of the artist's production. This is a full-fledged art-design, where the artist brings her style, but also her soul, as well as some distinctive features of her artwork, this time just to make them joyfully subservient to a specific function: to sit down, relax, dream, lost in thought.
There are also trapestries inspired by Marie Antoinette on display, that in some way give context to the small seats on the charming upper floor of the Milan gallery, in the heart of the 5 Vie borough.

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