The shape of Spring

Color as Experience. Conversation with Valentina, Art Director of La Corallina

There is a precise moment, every year, when light stops merely illuminating and begins to reveal. It is an almost imperceptible threshold, yet a decisive one: spring does not enter space, it transforms it. Color, then, is no longer an attribute, but a condition.

In the work of La Corallina, this transition becomes a project. Surfaces become porous to light, botanical motifs do not decorate but establish a relationship, and the domestic object returns to being what, ultimately, it has always been: a mediator between the world and the gaze.

We discuss this with Valentina, art director of the Florentine brand.

In spring, color seems to cease being an aesthetic choice and becomes a form of presence.

That is exactly the case. Color is never neutral, but in spring this truth becomes evident. It is no longer contained within form: it passes through it, expands it. The Procida collection, for example, emerges from a very precise intuition: that color can produce a spatial vibration. The contrasts, the luminous backgrounds, the tension between the floral motif and the surface are not conceived to represent a flower, but to convey its energy, its happening. Procida does not describe spring; it enacts it.

In Mahé Orchidee, by contrast, the relationship with the botanical seems more suspended, almost meditative.

Mahé Orchidee is a collection that works with distance. The orchid is a flower that does not impose itself, but offers itself. It has a slow temporality, a presence that never fully invades space. We sought to respect this quality, allowing the background to remain airy, allowing the color not to saturate the surface. The result is an object that does not close the gaze, but prolongs it. In this sense, Mahé Orchidee introduces into the home a form of visual silence, a pause.

Levanzo, on the other hand, introduces a much broader chromatic plurality, almost a constellation.

Spring is never monochord. It is a plural season. With Levanzo, we were interested in working on this idea of coexistence: each color maintains its own identity, but it is in their relationship that the overall meaning emerges. The table, then, is no longer a uniform surface, but an open, mobile visual field. Levanzo allows the home never to be completely defined, but always in transformation.

This principle becomes even more evident in the lampshades, where color encounters light.

Yes, because the lampshade introduces a further dimension: color is no longer only seen, but lived. The Flora Geranei lampshade generates a vibrant, unstable, almost atmospheric light. The floral motifs, crossed by light, lose their fixity and become a luminous event.
Flora Ortensie, by contrast, works with a more gathered tone. Hydrangeas possess an almost restrained quality, and the light they produce modifies space in a more intimate, more continuous way.
The lampshade is not an object one looks at. It is an object that modifies the way everything else appears.

Can we say that these collections do not simply introduce color into space, but change the way space exists?

I believe that this is precisely the task of design. Not to add, but to transform. Procida, Mahé Orchidee, Levanzo, together with the Flora Geranei and Flora Ortensie lampshades, are not objects that occupy space. They are objects that reopen it. Spring, ultimately, is not a season. It is a possibility of the gaze. And design can make it inhabitable.

PROCIDA

MAHE ORCHIDEE

FLORA GERANEI

FLORA ORTENSIE