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FORMAE in Milan: when form becomes care

By 5 Novembre 2025CRAMUM, Cultura

In the heart of Milan, FORMAE brings together four distinct voices—Franco Mazzucchelli, Carla Tolomeo, Fulvio Morella, and Lorenzo Gnata—to test the limits of matter and the responsibilities of form. Realized with Gaggenau, Sotheby’s, and Cramum, and curated by Sabino Maria Frassà, the exhibition draws on chapters opened in Florence, Naples, and Verona, and distills them into a clear, collector-friendly proposition: design is not a frame around art, but a spark that ignites it.

“I’m less interested in declaring what beauty is than in asking what beauty does,” notes curator Sabino Maria Frassà. “FORMAE is a promise, not a verdict. It invites us to recognize form as a responsibility—towards matter, towards time, and towards each other.”

At the center is Gaggenau’s new Expressive and Minimalistic ovens—not as product display, but as intellectual trigger. Their rigorous engineering and restraint become a point of departure for four different ways of making form visible, tangible, and, crucially, shareable.

Opere di Fulvio Morella e Franco Mazzucchelli in mostra

Four artists, four vectors of form

Franco Mazzucchelli—often dubbed the “tailor of the invisible”—works with air as a structural principle. His transparent inflatable volumes soften geometry and turn space into a breathing organism. The effect is architectural and playful at once: you don’t just look; you measure yourself against a volume that expands, contracts, and reorients your path.

“Mazzucchelli proves that lightness can be structural,” says Frassà. “It’s form that doesn’t dominate space; it makes room for the viewer.”

Carla Tolomeo advances a counter-tempo made of patience and thread. Her textile “chair-sculptures”—roses that wait, tartaruga seats that shelter—carry an almost liturgical attention to time. The hand-stitched textures and generous volumes hold memory without nostalgia, offering collectors a rare combination of intimacy and presence.

“Tolomeo’s work teaches that time is a formal value,” Frassà observes. “You can feel what has been preserved so that it can be used—sensitively—today.”

Fulvio Morella translates touch into language. With his Braille Stellato, the Occhio series, and the cycle Raccontami il ritorno, he embroider-maps thoughts by philosophers into constellations of Braille points. Seen from a distance, the stars scatter; up close, they become a legible narrative of memory, proximity, and inclusion.

“Morella reminds us that form can be read as well as seen,” says Frassà. “His disorderly stars reveal universal geometries of thought. Beauty here is not a privilege of sight—it’s a shared code.”

Lorenzo Gnata pushes drawing off the page and into the room. Filament-like lines turn into spatial orientations—arches, vectors, thresholds—that choreograph the gaze and re-stage the distance between self and other. The work is subtle but decisive: a grammar of edges and passages for those who collect with the eye and the body.

“Gnata converts the line into architecture,” Frassà explains. “He doesn’t decorate space; he organizes it, asking our gaze to choose a path.”

From function to ethic

The thread tying these approaches is not style but stance. The show draws on an Aristotelian intuition—matter as potentiality, form as act—and brings it into the present through the ethics of looking.

“Form is not a mask we put on matter,” Frassà says. “It’s the moment when potential becomes accountable. In a time of loud personalisms and easy dogmas, FORMAE asks us not to impose a single image of the world, but to make space for complexity without flattening it.”

This is where the collaboration with Gaggenau matters: the discipline of high-end design—precision, restraint, longevity—meets the open-endedness of art. The Expressive and Minimalistic ovens appear not as protagonists but as catalysts. They formalize heat, time, and control; the artists respond with air, thread, touch, and line. For collectors, the message is clear: true luxury today is attention—to process, to materials, to how an object sits in a life.

“Design here stops being mere function,” Frassà adds. “It becomes a question: how do we care—practically and aesthetically—for what we bring into the world?”

Why it matters for collectors

For a high-level collection, FORMAE suggests criteria that outlast market cycles:

  • Material intelligence: from PVC chambers to hand-stitched textiles, from Braille constellations to spatial filaments, each work turns technique into thought.

  • Temporal depth: these are not instant images; they sediment time—of making, of looking, of living with.

  • Dialogic presence: the pieces don’t end at their edges; they activate rooms and relationships. This is art you can stage in conversation with architecture and design rather than in spite of them.

“A collection is a city of forms,” Frassà concludes. “It needs breathing spaces, places of slowness, points of legibility, and routes of passage. With Mazzucchelli, Tolomeo, Morella, and Gnata, FORMAE offers all four.”

A final note

The exhibition is not about consensus around a single idea of beauty. It’s about rehearsing beauty as a shared practice—one that moves from the hand to the eye to the room, and back again. For collectors, that practice has a concrete outcome: works that keep giving form—to spaces, to habits of attention, and to the ethics of care that a serious collection embodies.

“Beauty is not an ornament,” says Frassà. “It’s a commitment—fulfilled when potential becomes act, and when a private judgment finds its echo in a common voice.”