On 10 September, the Italian Cultural Institute in Brussels hosts a screening and talk with Italian designer Mario Trimarchi, presenting Dieci tipi di nero (Ten Types of Black), a film by Emilio Neri Tremolada. Winner of the Design Film Award 2024, the movie explores Trimarchi’s “sweet obsession” with drawing and his world of infinite shades of black.
Radical Landscapes , Brussels
Radical Landscapes
Mario Trimarchi
Radical Landscapes marks Mario Trimarchi’s first solo exhibition in Brussels. The Compasso d’Oro award– winning designer and architect presents a selection of his most recent work, including unique objects and drawings on paper. Trimarchi’s research unfolds across delicate, poetic landscapes captured in his drawings, and continues into the creation of unexpected and sometimes precarious objects: sophisticated assemblages of raw materials such as glass, metal mesh, stone, brass with domestic and familiar forms. These fragile yet striking constructions talk to us about the unachievable equilibrium of life, about warmth and coldness, instability and solidity, lightness and weight, transparency and opacity. In Radical Landscapes, Trimarchi invites us to explore the poetic friction between the natural and the designed — between what we know and what we are still learning to see.
Monika Unger — Exhibition concept and production
©Fabio Vigano
Mario Trimarchi is a designer and architect who sees design as a means to bring poetry into the world of everyday objects. Formerly director of Design Master’s course at Domus Academy, he was part of the Olivetti Design Studio before founding the brand consultancy Fragile. Today, through his own practice, Mario Trimarchi Design, he creates objects and furniture for leading international companies.
In 2016, he was awarded the Compasso d’Oro for the Ossidiana coffee maker designed for Alessi. His work often explores the boundaries between drawing and design: in 2019, he held solo exhibitions of his drawings at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris and at the Design Hub in Barcelona. In 2020, two pieces from Botanica — a collection of sound‒absorbing panels for Caimi — were acquired by the Quirinale Contemporaneo Collection.
In 2022, he was invited by the Korea Craft and Design Foundation to design five small Yugi brass altars, and received the Targa d’Oro from the Unione Italiana Disegno (UID) for his contribution to drawing culture.
In 2024, the film Ten Types of Black, directed by Emilio Neri Tremolada, was released, offering a poetic reflection on Trimarchi’s black‒and‒white drawings, which he describes as a way to “forever fix the presence of things and ensure their peaceful survival.”
Since 2024, his research at the intersection of art and design broadens, leading to a series of solo exhibitions in Milan (Galleria Jannone and Paula Seegy Gallery), Como (Galleria Diaz 14), and London (Mint Gallery).
He draws day and night.
