Ettore Sottsass

Happiness and melancholia were the two extremes that marked the life and artistic career of Ettore Sottsass: happiness at having experienced the lost but ever-present paradise of childhood; sorrow at not being able to return there, not being able to stop time. The organisational psychologist and photographer Giuseppe Varchetta started photographing Ettore Sottsass in 1978, when the designer was already sixty, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. In this discreet, attentive, at times intimate account, Varchetta examines his friend’s face and follows his gradual changes, capturing all the nuances of that mournful expression, and, beyond the sadness, a smile that was an explosion of empathy.