Crown Jewels is an evocative installation that Tony Cragg composed using plastic waste all characterized by white and arranged, as in a sort of mosaic, to give shape to a majestic imperial crown. Although the objects of the composition, even though they are rejected even rather damaged, are singularly legible, their presence is however altered in a much broader image, that of the crown, which the viewer reconstructs through a process of reading and association, passing from understanding. of the single object / material to that of a more complex figure. The work, also considering the period in which it was made, the beginning of the 1980s, certainly brings a reflection on the national identity and on the political and social situation of the Thatcher era, which is also found in other works of the English artist, such as Britain Seen from the North, Union Jack and Riot Policeman.

Tony Cragg has been using his particular technique of the fly-maker since the 1970s, but in 1980 two innovations take over: the compositions of plastic objects begin to give shape to real images and no longer abstract and, the figurations, for easier reading, from the floor, where the artist had placed them until then, they move to the wall. In this passage from the horizontality of the floor to the verticality of the wall, there is a new conquest: lying on the floor, the figure would inevitably have been subjected to perspective deformations due to the change in the viewer's point of view, while his conformation could stand out more clearly, letting all its iconic power come out. For the work Crown Jewels, the figure of the crown was made by the artist freehand, drawing from a real image of the Imperial Crown used as a reference and shown on a large sheet of transparent polythene placed on the floor. This sheet, on which the silhouettes of the various objects that create the composition have been traced, constitutes the basis from which to set up the work on the exhibition wall.

Apollo e Dafne reloaded, by the Neapolitan artist and designer Mario Coppola, is a monumental sculpture in PLA (polylactic acid) modeled through rapid prototyping by wire deposition. It is a site-specific installation, which develops vertically in fluid continuity with the vaults of the Plart Museum, where it made its debut on the occasion of the artist's personal exhibition in 2017, entitled Cosmogonie by Angela Tecce.

The work is a contemporary reinterpretation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne and is the result of an experimentation that crosses ancient and modern art, from Bernini to Moore, from Michelangelo to Boccioni. "Biodigital Madonna escaping from the visitor's gaze", is how the philosopher Leonardo Caffo defines it, highlighting how, in the actualization of the myth, Apollo's anxiety and desire - absent here - are embodied by the onlookers. In the frightened face of the nymph, a sign of an entirely human frailty, there is at the same time expressed a condition that goes beyond the human, between mythology and science fiction, where the woman is also a plant, a machine, an avatar. Mario Coppola's work is of great interest also for its formal and methodological success, and for the material used, PLA, a bioplastic of vegetable origin mainly made with corn, which can biodegrade. In fact, Mario Coppola's Daphne could one day return to the earth like that laurel bush of which Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. A powerful suggestion that Coppola lets come out of all his works, both as an artist and as a designer.

Riccardo Dalisi's Ballerinas are colorful floating figures made up of sheets of polymethylmethacrylate that reinterpret his famous compasses in copper and tin, small anthropomorphic sculptures on the border between art and crafts, fairy tales and poetry. In the 2000s, the well-known Neapolitan architect is confronted with an unusual material for him, plexiglass, and for Plart, in 2011 he created the Ballerinas. On that occasion, Dalisi wrote about plastic: «Plastic carries with it the whole history of materials, it coincides with the history of man and his culture. With fire and beating, metals once became more and more sophisticated in form (hammers, rods, sheets of which tin is a nodal point, a watershed for its malleability and resistance). The research on materials continues inexhaustible, leading to the so-called "plastics": they can be easily manipulated and are a pure product of chemistry, an expression of knowledge of the composition of matter. Nature, with its variety, appears today only as a chapter of a larger universe created by man. Geometry (with fractals etc.), devised by human ingenuity, surpasses and encompasses the universe of geometry in nature. It's the same with the materials ".

The 577 / S lamp is the 1970s edition of a lamp designed by Aleksandr Rodchenko in 1925 for the Workers' Club of the Soviet Pavilion presented at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. In 1971, Gino Sarfatti, founder of Arteluce, after seeing sketches and drawings of lamps by the Russian constructivist from 1925, commissioned his designers to reproduce them. Thus, in 1974, the lamps Mod. 576, 577 and 577 / S were born. The 577 / S, in particular, is a suspension lamp characterized by a strongly geometric design given by the intersection of four plates of the same shape made of satin opal polymethylmethacrylate. As regards the aesthetic aspects of the lamp, we can certainly affirm that Rodchenko had a very precise idea of the conception of objects, which came to him from his adherence to the principles of Soviet constructivism, a dynamic conception of the object which, often, in addition to be synthetic, it must possess the requisites of transformability and adaptability to the collective environment.

Among the luminaires present in the collection of the Plart Foundation, there is the iconic Ufo lamp designed in 1957 by Ettore Sottsass for Arredoluce, an Italian company founded by Angelo Lelli in 1943 and destined to mark the design of electric lighting fixtures in Italy for research, attention to detail and technological innovations applied to the creation of each product.

The lamp designed by Ettore Sottsass in the late 1950s can be seen as an important antecedent of the Italian radical design movement of the 1960s and, at the same time, a precursor of postmodernism in the 1980s. Ufo is characterized by a strong sculptural presence influenced by Sottsass's interest in constructivist sculpture and by an attention to functionality that also resides in the use of innovative materials. Ufo is made up of only two printed polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) plates (one white, the other yellow) held together by four enameled metal rods, ending with eight colorless acrylic feet. The two PMMA elements, with their delicately swollen shapes, diffused the light with a soft and warm effect, hiding its source. The table lamp could also be flipped to produce an alternative lighting effect. Sottsass' early use of plastics for this lamp prefigures the intense experimentation with plastics in the lighting sector that took place in Italy during the 1960s, and is significant of an iconography of the period, that of the space exploration and which refers to the images of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite launched into orbit that same year.

Metropoligth is a lamp conceived in 1970 by the German designer Jan Roth and produced by the Design M of the well-known designer Ingo Maurer. In the Plart collection there are two examples of this lamp, one entered the Incutti collection at the end of the 1980s, the other the result of a private donation in 2009. The Metropoligth, white in color, consists of an ovoid shape crossed by large pods. The body of the lamp is composed of two identical bell-shaped elements, joined by a simple interlocking mechanism. The material with which it is made is polystyrene (expanded polystyrene), a material widely used in areas such as packaging or thermal insulation.

Polystyrene or polystyrene, in the semi-expanded form, comes in a granular form, similar to white pearls. In this form, it was used, for example, for the creation of one of the most famous chairs in the furniture design sector, the Sacco Armchair designed by Gatti, Paolini and Teodoro in 1968 and produced by Zanotta. In the expanded form - that of the Metropoligth lamp - polystyrene, on the other hand, is very little used as a design material, but regularly used for insulation, packaging and food packaging, areas in which it is appreciated for its ability to absorbing moisture and being hard but flexible at the same time. In the creative field, expanded synthetic materials such as polystyrene were used in the 1960s as an artistic expression in their own right in works by artists such as Gianni Colombo, Nicola Carrino, Piero Gilardi (later switched to the use of softer and more yielding polyurethane foam ), Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jean Dubuffet and Giuseppe Antonello Leone. As already mentioned, it is more difficult to find its application in the creation of design objects, which makes the Metropoligth lamp almost unique in this sector.

The object represented here is a toy that falls into a specific hobby category, that of model making, which after the Second World War, had a rapid increase thanks to plastics and new molding methods, such as injection molding thanks to which faithful details could be obtained even in very small formats: pieces of ships, airplanes and other vehicles that were previously made of wood, tin and other natural materials, were now produced in plastic, and in much higher quantities and at low cost. Our object belongs, among other things, to a particular sphere of modeling, which begins to spread with the success of the great Hollywood films. The big film companies, in fact, are beginning to sell to toy companies licenses for the production of merchandising which, together with the promotion of the same films, nourish the fame of characters who have become cult objects. To confirm this, the toy in question reproduces the character of King Kong, protagonist of the homonymous film directed in 1933 by Merian Caldwell Cooper and Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack. The polystyrene object is produced by the American company Aurora Plastics Corporation founded in 1950 by the engineer Joseph Giammarino and the entrepreneur Abe Shikes in Brooklyn. At the beginning of its activity, Aurora produced injection-molded plastic materials for third parties but in 1952 the company started the production of plastic models. As reported on the basis of the object, the King Kong belonging to the collection of the Plart Foundation was made in 1964. Aurora Plastics Corporation supplied, together with the assembly instructions of the various pieces that made up the kit, also the Styrene Plastic Cement, the 'adhesive that was used to glue the various parts of the model.

In England, one of the first toy manufacturers to obtain a license from Disney to produce merchandise inspired by animated film characters was Newfeld Limited founded by Charles Neufeld in the town of Ashford, Middlesex, in the second half of the twentieth century. The company contributed to the pleasure of post-war children by creating Bendy Toys, a commercial brand with which it distributed toys characterized by the extreme flexibility of the bodies from which, most likely, the name Bendy. The Bendy Toys branded toys, in addition to the Disney characters, also reproduced the characters of the Muppets which had an extraordinary success so as to push the company to create Muppetts Baby. On the production process of Bendy brand toys, it is known that they begin their life as clay models of the same size from which a plaster mold is made from which, in turn, a metal mold used in manufacturing is made. some toys. If you examine any Bendy Toys, you can see that they are made with a spongy rubber that incorporates, in fact, a metal skeleton.

The Phonola 547 model is a radio receiver designed by Pier Giacomo Castiglioni, Livio Castiglioni and Luigi Caccia Dominioni in 1939-40 and produced in Italy by Fimi-Phonola of Saronno. The black radio has a very innovative shape: it recalls, in fact, that of a telephone set with a rectangular base and a projecting and slightly inclined loudspeaker, covered by a convex grille, with large cylindrical holes useful for increasing the diffusion in the environment of sound waves. When designing the Phonola 547, the designers took military devices as a reference for their small size, functionality and practicality. The intent of Fimi-Phonola, in fact, was to market a device that cost little, was made with cheap materials, but which did not neglect the attention to qualitative, functional and aesthetic aspects. The realization of the model 547 saw a great collaboration between the designers and technicians of Fimi, so much so that the development of the shape of the radio, which follows the arrangement of the internal devices, was the fruit of this cooperation. However, the perfect synergy between function and form, of the form that adapts perfectly to the content, enhancing its qualities, would not have been possible without the invention of plastic materials. The chassiss of the radio, in fact, is a mono die-cast shell in phenolic resin, the famous Bakelite, the first entirely synthetic plastic patented by Leo Hendrik Baekland in 1907 and also known as the "material with a thousand uses" for its numerous applications: from production of radios, alarm clocks, telephones, toothbrushes or jewelry.

The Tomato Chair was designed by the Scandinavian designer Eero Aarnio for Adelta in 1971. Its production therefore comes at a time when the difficulties associated with the design and production of fiberglass are completely overcome thanks to molding techniques that the same designers helped to improve. In Eero Aarnio's production, the Tomato Chair represents an evolution of the Pastil Chair, an ovoid chair that resembled the shape of a tablet and which earned Aarnio, in 1968, the Design Award of the American Institute of Interior Designers. The Pastil Chair could float and carry a person in water, but it was unstable. It was enough for Arnio to imagine adding three spherical elements to the Pastil design, two on the side and one on the back, to stabilize the new seat that took the name of Tomato Chair. The three spherical elements added, in addition to giving stability to the chair, also performed the functions of armrests and backrest. The lexical component also makes this session celebrated. The word tomato, in fact, in its English version, reflects its appearance: looking at the chair from the front, you can see the two spherical shapes that correspond to the two "o" of the word "tomato".

The tray, the small plate and the jug represented in this photo are typical crockery produced in the 1930s by the English company Brookes & Adams. The production of these objects is closely linked to Beetle Products Co., which in 1925 managed to produce molding powders derived from the condensation liquid of thiourea with formaldehyde. These powders, the Beetle Molding Powder, were mixed with cellulose pulp and were used by various companies, including Brookes & Adams, for the production of tableware and household items known under the trade name Bandalasta. The Bandalasta brand items are characterized by a wide range of colors and marbled effects that the company was able to obtain by mixing dyes with molding powders. The compounds were used to produce complete sets of crockery, each of which, in fact, had the same numbering stamped on the base. In a commercial catalog of the late 1920s, Brookes & Adams presented its products as follows: “Bandalasta was made in a variety of beautiful marbled and translucent pastel shades. In the Marbled shades no two pieces were exactly alike, but all the pieces of the same color number were blended so that they could be built up in complete sets ". [Bandalasta products are made in a variety of beautiful translucent marbled and pastel shades. In marbled shades, no two pieces are exactly alike, but all pieces of the same color number are joined together so that they can form complete sets]. The presentation text emphasizes marbled effects and color varieties. The synthetic resins produced until then, the Bakelites, could in fact only be obtained in shades of brown and straw yellow. On the other hand, the Beetle molding powders, thanks to their semi-transparency, introduced, in the 1920s, the possibility of adding color to plastics, a quality that for these materials today appears so obvious to us, but which in those years did not it was by no means obvious.