I went to Villa Panza to see the exhibition dedicated to Josef Albers.
I have known his work for a long time and, of course, I was familiar with Homage to the Square, his research into colour, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College and Yale. But seeing the works in person is something else. Above all because, at a certain point, you stop simply looking at coloured squares and begin to wonder what is happening to your eyes.
And that is probably exactly the point.
Albers spent a lifetime demonstrating that colour never exists on its own. It changes according to what is placed beside it, according to proportions, quantity and light. The same colour can appear to be another, while two different colours can come surprisingly close to looking identical.
It sounds simple. In reality, it is anything but.
Perhaps this is also why I continue to find his work so contemporary. Not only as a designer, but especially when I think about teaching.
Albers used to say that his task was “to open eyes”.
An extremely simple phrase that, for anyone who teaches design, contains a great deal.
Before designing, we need to learn to see
We can teach students to draw, model, understand materials, use Rhino, V-Ray and now, of course, artificial intelligence. We can explain methods, processes and tools.
But if a student does not learn how to look, all of this only takes them so far.
Looking means noticing differences. Understanding why one thing works and another does not. Seeing a relationship that we had not noticed before. Sometimes even questioning what appears obvious.
I believe this is exactly what Albers taught.
He did not provide a formula to apply. He created the conditions for students to experience a phenomenon directly and arrive at an understanding through their own eyes.
And this, in my view, remains one of the highest forms of teaching design.
A window
After seeing the exhibition, I continued walking through Villa Panza and, at a certain point, stopped in front of a window.
One of those old windows whose glass is not perfectly flat.
Looking through it, the courtyard of the Villa was slightly distorted: the façades, the sky, the trees. Everything remained perfectly recognisable and yet, at the same time, it was different.
I took a photograph.
At another moment I would probably have walked straight past it. After Albers, however, that window seemed almost like another of his lessons.
Reality was still there, of course. What had changed was the way I was looking at it.
And then, light
One of the beautiful things about Villa Panza is that the encounter with Albers does not really end when the exhibition does.
You continue walking and encounter works from the collection built over the years by Giuseppe Panza, an extraordinary figure to whom we owe a great deal.
When you reach Dan Flavin’s rooms, colour — which in Albers was still pictorial matter — suddenly becomes light.
Real light.
It enters the architecture, colours the walls, reflects on the floor and floods the corridors. And as you move through the spaces, the way you perceive them changes continuously.
I could not help thinking that there was a continuity between these experiences, even though they belong to very different artists and moments in time.
First, colour alters what we see.
Then light directly alters the space we inhabit.
What I take away
I left Villa Panza thinking that certain lessons of the Bauhaus still have a great deal to teach us, provided that we do not turn them into a kind of historical repertoire of forms, colours and geometries.
The most interesting legacy lies elsewhere.
It is curiosity. It is experimentation. It is refusing to take what is in front of us for granted.
And above all, it is that phrase by Albers that I continue to find extraordinary: to open eyes.
It applies to students, of course.
But it applies just as much to those of us who continue to design.
Because perhaps an important part of our work consists precisely in being able to see something that others, at least for the moment, have not yet seen.