Ink Jewels

It was 1989 when Alfredo Taroni established, with some friends, the Lithos atelier, a small publishing house for paper works that combined graphics and poetry, to later add architecture and design, offering a new code of expression and creativity. These were true jewels in ink, where the pages were able to excite the reader, where form and content used different materials and visual languages. Thicknesses, colours, lines, characters, where every element of the book adds art to art, until the result is object of design, reaching out beyond its content of words and images. Lithos celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year and has a great story to tell, with its most famous endeavours including the works with Ettore Sottsass, produced in a partnership that endured from 1995 to 2007. During these years the first architectural volumes were published, such as Le Epifanie Brevi (brief epiphanies) and the Trattato di Architettura (treatise on architecture), the latter accompanied by four lithographs, and numerous other works in the same series from the likes of Michele De Lucchi, Andrea Branzi, Alessandro Mendini, Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino and Roberto Baldazzini.

“There is an intimate je ne sais quoi behind the creation of these projects, possible only through a meeting of intention and thought. What oozes from these volumes is harmony, the approach with the artist, adding what has never been seen before to the known, a personal and creative process made up of moments, experiment, passion, energy and synergies”, says Alfredo Taroni. “The story is that of an object within the object, bringing the submerged world of the creative mind to the surface. These have been thirty intense years, with exchanges of ideas, of passion, and of study, thirty positive years during which we have had the good fortune to be able to interweave our own journeys with those of extraordinary characters. We celebrate them in a series of events in which the focus will be on the artists themselves, their modus operandi, and their own irreplaceability. It does not however end here as we are also collaborating with Andrea Branzi, Enzo Cucchi and Michele De Lucchi on new projects, and producing a new series of etchings with Mario Trimarchi, and there is truly no better way we could do honour to own work”.

There are many ‘works on paper‘ that have in recent years come out of Lithos, that must be regarded as art of the highest quality, designed and created with artists, architects and poets of international renown. These have included Ico Parisi, Mario Luzi, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alberto Nessi, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Giorgio Orelli, Fabio Pusterla and Andrea Zanzotto, to name but a few.

Since 2007 Lithos has been a cultural association dedicated to developing and promoting graphics and art books through training courses on printing techniques, as well as with exhibitions and cultural events in which architecture, design and applied art mix with ‘doing art’, thanks to the meeting of artists, architects and designers, and the chance to reflect on their imaginations and design languages, offering creative and poetic ideas for those who want to browse the beauty of art.