THE WHITE SNOW DRIADE COLLECTION 2021

Lorenzo Petrantoni and Giuseppe Ragazzini interpret the iconic collection The White Snow designed by Antonia Astori in 1996

For the 2021 edition of the Art of the Table collection, inspired by art and eclecticism, distinctive values of the brand, Driade enlists internationally recognized and highly talented visual arts artists and illustrators Lorenzo Petrantoni and Giuseppe Ragazzini.

Each one interprets the iconic collection The White Snow designed by Antonia Astori in 1996 with their own style and language.

The eclecticism, extravagant timeless elegance and joyfulness that characterize Driade’s art of living are perfectly represented in the new collection. Art of the Table by Driade, a collection of porcelain sets for a sophisticated mise en place with character, is enriched this year with new proposals. The product range has been expanded with in new elements different sizes and reorganised by offering personalised sets for all needs, creating a new concept of purchasing.

Each set is presented and enhanced by new packaging, made of recyclable material, which tells and enhances the content. The external graphics contribute to making each set a display element inside the shops and an idea for a refined and original gift for the end user.

ONCE UPON A PLATE, decor by Lorenzo Petrantoni

Lorenzo Petrantoni is a multifaceted and surprising artist, illustrator, and art director. The world’s biggest magazines have had him on their covers at least once, from the New York Times to Newsweek, from Vogue to Style Magazine, GQ, and Vanity Fair.

His works are exhibited in some of the most important contemporary art galleries in the world and have won him prestigious awards including the V&A Illustration Awards, London International Awards, New York Festival, American Illustration.

After studying graphic arts in Milan, he moved to France to work as Art director at Young & Rubicam. Back in Italy, after a period in the biggest communication agencies, he abandoned advertising to devote himself completely to illustration.

Influenced and fascinated by 18th century engravings and graphics, he combines these elements in his illustrations and videos. His primary sources of inspiration are the books and dictionaries of that period, which he gives new life to through his work: the images, graphics and illustrations recovered during his wanderings among the bouquinistes are recomposed by Petrantoni with skill and knowledge like pieces of a mosaic, to form splendid contemporary inlays with a retro flavour. Timeless collages that restore life and new meanings to images forgotten between the pages of ancient volumes.

For Driade, the Genoese artist draws on the nineteenth-century graphic repertoire for a set of plates that characterises his expressive language.

BESTIARIO DELLA TAVOLA, decor by Giuseppe Ragazzini

A painter, set designer and visual artist, Giuseppe Ragazzini always goes through a series of intermediate stages in which new elements come to life from previous ones, creating new and unexpected forms with new and unexpected results, with the aim of achieving a more authentic and more instinctive figuration than a composition resulting from the traditional illustrative process.

His collage animations are also often based on the principle of metamorphosis and randomness: faces that change frame by frame or mechanical gears that intersect, combining in new formal solutions and producing surprising results. It is therefore a creative process in which chance and, consequently, error, play a fundamental role. It is a continuous attempt to integrate, correct, and reabsorb a mistake, transforming it into another form and giving it a character of “necessity”. Ragazzini’s creativity, in its freest form, is often expressed through chance and the paradoxical attempt to control it.

The new Bestiario della Tavola collection stems from the artist’s passion for pictorial metamorphosis. This modular bestiary created on Driade’s plates is, once again, an attempt to recreate this game of mechanisms and multiple joints, but in this case on a new extraordinary support such as the plate, an eternal object with a perfect shape that lends itself to being used as the fundamental component of a “physical” gear.