The art of imperfection

"I don't like repetition. Everything has to be different," he says.

He has said that he likes the kind of beauty that is full of mistakes. "Perfection is for machines. It is obsolete. It is gone."

Pesce is also an avid explorer of different materials, especially newly invented ones. He experiments with them to give each product he designs a color, shape or texture-the only one of its kind.

"I don't like wood, iron, metal or stone. I don't like a set of traditional materials. I like very much the (new) materials from my time, such as elastomer, the huge family of foams-semirigid, rigid, elastic-and resin. It is a way to be sincere.

"The materials I use are liquid. I mix them like making a cream."

In these materials Pesce feels a relationship with, and the spirit of, his time and the liquidity of values. "The values, in my time, go up and down. They disappear and reappear."

Glenn Adamson, a curator and design writer based in New York City, once commented: "Pesce's oeuvre has a cavernous profundity which rewards deep exploration. But paradoxically, his objects also declare themselves on their surfaces, in ways that even a child (perhaps especially a child) can read.

"When Pesce wants to speak to the human condition, he draws a face. When he wants to evoke rapid transformation, let's say in a table or chair, he uses fluid pouring techniques."

Pesce says what defines him is curiosity. "I like to discover, possibly, something that doesn't yet exist. Maybe my design is like that, and my architecture is like that-you can be the judge."