VIÖLETT GAS – PROJECT (Artist: Blume Labo)
“17th September 1944, Ardennes. 101 Airborne Forces.
An C47 aircraft off course heading to Dunkirk jettisons its crew and definitely misses the target. While trying to return to the muster point, the men come across a trap door that leads to an underground bunker.
They enter cautiously and discover a strange laboratory full of various objects they cannot easily identify. Each part has the same brand name punched in the metal: Viölett Gas”.
Viölett Gas, with its distinctive vintage purple colouring, is a line of industrial lamps and collectable objects crafted by Italian artist Blume Labo. The collection draws inspiration from a fantastical underground world in 1940’s wartime France. This secretive and hidden world is where industrial metal and the mud of the trenches converge with earth and blood. By recycling salvaged post-war and onwards objects and parts, made of mainly brass metal and glass, these unusual and unconventional creations are given new life.
The objects and parts selected by Blume Labo, which range from gasmasks to table top syringes, have a sense of uneasiness in their original clinical and antiseptic functions that is balanced by the pleasing aesthetic combination of brass metal and glass. Each piece in the line has been individually repurposed from their original wartime function and carefully hand assembled into paradoxically captivating lamps and collectable objects. Blume Labo imbues each one-of-a-kind piece in Viölett Gas line with a sense of post-war industrialism alongside a contemporary spin. It is important to note that each lamp and object has been purposely created such that they cannot be mass-produced.
Blume Labo is a multifaceted artist designer, whose creative genius is able to draw inspiration from the most common and insignificant objects and to give them a brand-new life in the form of odd and one-of-a-kind items such as unusual lamps series “Viölett Gas ” or bat boxes.
Blume Labo speaks little about himself. His true self is felt and captured by his audience in his artistic productions. One can expect a series of meticulously hand assembled and original metal works consisting of salvaged parts and materials. As new life is given to these salvaged materials, in the form of art lamp and collectable object for display, a transformation is realized: the functionalizing of static items into contemporary forms that are both idiosyncratic yet innovative. Blume Labo’s weapons of choice are odd and eccentric in the quirkiest sense. From industrial screws and valves, peculiar accessories and even gasmasks glow in their new contexts as they are transformed into industrial style lighting and collectable objects. In every piece created by Blume Labo, oxymoronic paradoxes emerge organically and intentionally. A constant tension is highlighted: the evocative is inspired by industrial gloom, the clinical becomes contemporary/aesthetically pleasing and beauty is found in the unnatural with machine made objects.
