Product Overview
Venusia Collection / Acta Necklace
Elena Salmistraro for Alessi 2022
Steel Coated with Hypoallergenic PVD, Gold finish
[L 38 x W 5cm]
A collection of “workshop jewellery”, embellished with refined metalwork. Gold, ancestral and industrial, figurative and abstract: in conceiving the Venusia collection, Elena Salmistraro creates a wholly original interpretation of the archetypal shapes of jewellery.
Award: Good Design USA 2022
Project Description: Ancestral and industrial, figurative and abstract, gold and black. In conceiving the Venusia collection, Elena Salmistraro creates an imaginary world in which the contrast of textures, colors, and geometries is enhanced by precious Italian workmanship.
It is as if the designer were using the jewel for its very essence, a play in constant balance between the sacred and the profane. The designer develops her research by following five “expressive strands” with evocative names – Acta, Fresia, Edone, Trama and Lorica – within which she explores different metal processes: from Etruscan granulation to deep-drawing, from laser cutting to calendering.
"Venusia is a variant of the name Venus, goddess of beauty. It recalls the close link between human beings and ornamental elements for the body, whose very beauty becomes an element of ‘shielding and protection.’ This is a bond that has always existed and is linked to religions, rituals, or the aesthetic taste of the individual.
She seeks to do it in her own way, of course, mixing the sacred and the profane, simplicity and complexity, the richness of the jewel with the roughness of the material, and the obvious formal modernity with primitive references. The decoration obtained with a succession of dots reinterprets one of the oldest and most fascinating goldsmith techniques, Etruscan granulation, in an industrial key; this refined process consisted in soldering tiny spheres of gold or silver on a metal sheet.
Thanks to its rich interaction with light, the aesthetic paradigm of granulation become a sort of luminous skin: the jewels almost become magical objects." Elena Salmistraro
