Fornasetti has forever played around with trompe l’oeil. Why? What appeals to Fornasetti about this type of technique and decoration?

Fornasetti has always played with trompe l’oeil, up to the point where this technique has become part and parcel of the company’s language and its visual poetry.
Before me, my father was undoubtedly fascinated by everything that revolved around optical illusion and perspective. Those unlikely reductions of dimensions and his predilection for ostentatious contrasts in scale – in which what is enormous in reality becomes smaller, or, especially, the other way around, it becomes bigger – were a constant element in his art. Fornasetti has always played with that sense of proportion – proportions which vanish – and that idea of perspective which beckons our gaze and lets it waver within an illusion.

Along with other perspectival and visual games and tricks the use of trompe l’oeil in Fornasetti’s art enriches the imaginative possibilities for the spectator. It arouses surprise and, for the person gazing upon it, it enhances that certain sense of fascinating abandon in a world of fantasy and play.

In your opinion, is trompe l’oeil still a way we can decorate and / or furnish a setting in a style that is contemporary?
Nowadays, it is a rather neglected way to decorate and furnish. Contemporary styles are less likely to contemplate techniques that trick the eye. This is also due to the fact that more figurative styles have lately been left a little by the wayside.

On my part, I am convinced that it is a way we can decorate and furnish. It is still able to converse in a contemporary fashion. This conviction of mine is proven by the fact that we are still using it today, in different contexts and with new functions, that I would define as critical yet playful at the same time. I am referring to those large open spaces in cities, vast apartment blocks in the suburbs, over-sized infrastructural complexes….all sorts of “non-places”. These are the new scenarios where street art and graffiti have chosen to settle. This is where such art is able to highlight this very different reality, this greyness of collective life in these times of advanced capitalism. The colourful and playful intervention of their “artistic depictions” is a new form of trompe l’oeil and it magnifies the aesthetic indifference of everything that surrounds it. In some cases, as with Banksy for example, it offers elements of social criticism or, in other cases, no-global and anti-commercial stances.

In a sort of innovative turn in terms of content, trompe l’oeil is experiencing a new form, a different connotation which is proof that it is now entirely back in vogue. What I find so interesting about this technique – in the broadest of senses in terms of its use throughout the centuries – is its ability to provide more space, more room for the person looking at it. The spectator is encouraged forth to witness an act of perception and imaginative reconstruction which, by its very nature, is wholly active.

Was there a source of inspiration among the artists of the past that would seem suited to the style of Fornasetti in this particular type of ornamentation?
There’s a highly ironic quotation by my father which I’ll share with you here since it seems to be perfect in this context and reveals his own position with regard to his sources of inspiration.

“In the opinion of Gio Ponti I am also a true Italian. Because I have understood the perspective of Piero della Francesca about the egg suspended upon a thread. That perspective, so perfect that it has become a fine example of both trompe-l’oeil and much-loathed decoration”.