Davide Groppi has been creating lights since the ‘80s, starting his activity in a small workshop in the historic center of Piacenza. It began to become known to the public in 1994, when Maddalena De Padova chose her lamps to decorate the windows of her historic showroom of Corso Venezia in Milan. Starting from that, the company met a series of ever-increasing affirmations, which culminated in 2014 with the victory of two Compasso d’Oro in the same year, a success that in the past has only been achieved by the very great Achille Castiglioni and Vico Magistretti.
The products awarded on that occasion perfectly exemplify the poetics of the light of Davide Groppi and the poles through which he moves: the Sampei floor lamp is a real ready made, inspired by the shapes of a fishing rod. The lamp Nothing is a particular form of architectural lighting constituted by a simple hole in the false ceiling from which a sensual radiance is projected into space, in a design that claims its utmost negation.
The ability of Davide Groppi lights to create environments with a strong emotional density led him to collaborate with renowned chefs and star restaurants, such as Massimo Bottura and Massimiliano Alajmo. From these experiences the company has drawn inspiration for the creation of Tetatet, a battery lamp that can be moved freely without the hitch of a thread. The wire becomes the protagonist in its sign and in its twists for the Neuro lamp, which responds to the need to bring light on a table starting from a socket on the ground.
The tension towards minimalism is important in projects such as Infinto, a very thin LED tape stretched from wall to wall or the Moon lamp made of Japanese paper, full of oriental suggestions. The Davide Groppi catalog also contains sudden flashes of irony, as in the wall lamp Edison’s Nightmare by Harry Thaler, amused tribute to the father of the halogen light bulb, or in the outdoor lamp Imu by Omar Carraglia, disguised as a birdhouse.
