Ettore Molinario and Rossella Colombari present Casa-Museo.
They tell their story :
We started designing this house the day we met, thirty years ago. And not because this was already the house, but because from day one our bond, the desire that united us, and still does, has been to live « inside » our passions, our devouring, regenerating desire for beauty. To live in each other’s world in order to invent « our » universe. And today this universe is the Casa-Museo of Ettore Molinario and Rossella Colombari.
A « Casa-Museo », so in all languages, to preserve the uniqueness of space, time, experiences. In our Casa-Museo, in this island-house, that was born from the radical renovation of a twentieth-century factory in the Isola district of Milan, we have created a sentimental dialogue between architecture, photography, design and sculpture. We say sentimental because it corresponds to our different characters, also different in the way we experience art: Ettore has been collecting photography and Indian and South East Asian sculpture for thirty years while Rossella has been researching and selling masterpieces of Italian design in her gallery. Once more we emphasise the adjective sentimental, because our story is at the same time encounter and confrontation between two different ideas of possession, on one hand the need to live daily among beloved objects, and this represents the instinctual autobiography of an art collector, and on the other hand the frenetic turnover that imposes a gallery of reference. Two apparently distant energies, some would say irreconcilable, and yet it was precisely in the invention of the Casa-Museo, in watching it grow day by day, from the shell to the setting up, that we measured, engaged and loved each other. One geometric shape narrates all this: the great circle that gives rhythm to the spaces of our house and that in its dynamism unites sensibility, research, together and solo travels.
A friend, who has curated one of France’s most important museum institutions, suggested a beautiful image: the eye of Ettore and the eye of Rossella from the vision of a single person and together they create a unique work, closed because private, fluid because every presence, even the strongest, is illuminating and reassuring, and open because in this silent intimacy, hidden from the rhythm of the metropolis, visitors are welcome on special occasions. A visit-desire. Like the life-desire that inhabits us each and every day.
Ettore Molinario & Rossella Colombari
Casa-Museo
Via Alserio 17
Milano 20159
www.collezionemolinario.com
