Massimo Caiazzo: color as a crossroads between art, science and social value

Who is Massimo Caiazzo

First Color Consultant in Italy, he collaborated from 1990 to 2006 with the prestigious Alessandro Mendini Atelier in Milan. Professor of Chromatology at the Verona Academy since 2003, he holds in-depth courses on color at the Brera Academy. As an artist he exhibits at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg and at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs del Louvre in Paris.

He also exhibited at the Museum 4th Block of Ecological Arts in Kiev.

He collaborates with the Future Film Festival of Bologna where he experiments with the artistic use of color in visual language. 

As President of IACC Italia he founded a Higher Education Academy which he describes as “a privileged meeting place to cultivate the culture of color and friendship”.

Together with Silvia Botti he published in 2021 “Living in colors – Knowing their secret language to understand and use them”, Vallardi Ed., where he exposes the research and applications of the various color theories in language accessible to all.

Massimo Caiazzo strikes you with his Neapolitan accent which amplifies the passion with which he talks about his numerous professional and human experiences, putting you immediately at ease, as if you were conversing with an old friend. Condensing such a varied journey is not easy, however it is an undertaking that is absolutely worth doing. And to read.

 

The interview with Massimo Caiazzo for our MEMbers

MEM – The first thing that catches the eye when looking back over your career is the concept of “synesthesia“: what exactly is it and why did it have such a predominant role in your professional life?

M.C. – True, I’m very happy to talk about it. To understand this concept we must start from the awareness that our senses are autonomous but not detached from each other: rather they cooperate. Since the human race rose above other mammals, the sense of smell has lost importance because our nose has moved far from the ground. At this point the field of vision has expanded, making sight the main sense for survival.

Despite this, our “limbic memory”, the oldest and most unconscious one, has kept track of our distant “olfactory” past by interacting with sight.

Chromatic vision has become a sort of intuitive sign that interacts with the other senses both on an unconscious and associative level, thus allowing us to survive. Think for example about how we distinguish an unripe fruit from a ripe one or how we detect a spoiled food compared to a healthy one.

The word Synesthesia

comes from the union of two ancient Greek words: “syn”, which means “together” and “aisthánomai”, which means “to perceive”.

It therefore means evoking the other senses starting from the stimulation of the one directly involved. The English philosopher John Locke described the experience of a blind person who could “feel” and “touch” colors, for example.

The first to suggest this concept were the ancient Egyptians, not to mention Aristotle and Plato.

Getting down to the practical, in our contemporary world, let’s think about sommeliers’ blindfolded wine tastings that provoke a strong reaction from their other senses.

 

MEM – Having established that sight and colors have become fundamental for our survival, let’s try to understand the function of the latter.

M.C. – Colors have an informative function because they allow us to orient ourselves, concentrate and perform any human function as best as possible.

When we deal with them from a design point of view, we must definitively take note that they do not perform a simple decorative function but that they have a direct physiological influence. Determining, in fact, human behavior and triggering chain reactions in us.

The problem is that we have gradually been uneducated in natural polychromy towards a monochromy that does not belong to us: architecture has done this from rationalism onwards; design did it as a convenient solution for commercial purposes. Fashion did it to narrow the field of vision by making people appear slimmer so as to make them adhere to the prevailing beauty standards.

Reclaiming color means reclaiming the awareness of the information that comes to us from ocular perception.

It means having to understand the cerebral and emotional stimuli they generate in us. It therefore means knowing how to design balanced environments and harmonious spaces that avoid hyper- or hypo-stimulation.

Neuroscience has been instrumental in this process of awareness.

MEM – Are we always talking about primary stimulations, therefore valid for anyone regardless of the different cultures and different perceptions that each of us may have?

M.C. – Color has physiological, psychological, communicative and semantic effects on us. In other words, there are the effects of the different wavelengths on our ocular and brain receptors, the mental sensations they cause us, the information they provide us and finally the meanings of the interaction between light and colors.

My teacher Frank H. Mahnke described in 1996 what he himself defined as the “Pyramid of Color Experience”: it is a pyramid divided into levels at the base of which we find the most physiological, immediate and least conscious stimulations up to the tip which is occupied by cultural influences, tastes, fashions, styles and finally the personal relationship with colour. We must resume the structure and proportion of the pyramid proposed by Mahnke by stopping starting from the tip and instead focusing on the first 3 levels of its base which represent the universal primary stimuli, valid regardless of the various cultures and individual sensitivities.

Always taking into account, however, that those levels cannot be rigidly separated as if they did not influence each other.

MEM – Massimo, you have gained considerable experience in managing the color of even “difficult” collective spaces; I am thinking in particular of his experience at the Bollate prison (MI) from 2006 to 2008, but also of his experiences in school buildings. Do you want to talk about it?

M.C. – First of all, it should be clarified that we are talking about projects, that is, processes that had specific purposes. Then it should also be specified that they were dialogue activities in which the role of different professionals and above all of the end users was decisive. The experience I had with school buildings had the aim of stemming school dropouts by improving the student/teacher ratio. Nothing less. All using color. How did we do it? Starting from the entrance and appropriately measuring polychromy and color temperatures, we managed to eliminate that terrible feeling that too many students have and which is summed up very well by the expression “They sent me here”! Then we acted on the classrooms by eliminating all those hyper-stimulations that lead to student distraction and putting the focus back on the teacher; we were very careful to respect the famous “3:1 ratio” between the floor that supports, the walls that limit and the ceiling which must never be white.

The results were surprising.

The experience at Bollate prison is the one I talk about more and more willingly because it made me grow a lot from a professional and human point of view. Bear in mind that for two years we have worked one-on-one with the guests of the facility, involving them in the material activity and in project feedback.

The challenge was to increase internal activities by relaxing relationships between prisoners and officers, decreasing the general aggression inherent in that type of environment.

Well, talking with the people involved it turned out that the biggest problem of life in prison was time. All the work was therefore focused on the perception of time and the physiological effects of colors. Their most hated place of all was the corridor, a white space that led to the cells on one side and to the audience on the other. Playing on warm and cold tones, on the “softness” of colors and their density, we created two distinct passages going towards the cells or towards the meeting room. In this regard, do you know what was the best compliment I received in my career?

MEM – No, tell us.

M.C. – One of the inmates, perhaps the most skeptical of all about that project and my work, someone who had never respected me for my role, approached me at the end of the project and said: “Engineer, do you know that now when my daughter comes I feel much less uncomfortable?”. This comment was worth all the efforts of that project and showed me all the social value of color and how important what I do is.

MEM – Do you also have any significant examples of private, residential collaboration?

M.C. – In the early nineties I was among the very few (if not the only) professional color designer in Italy, I was contacted by Gianna Nannini. She immediately trusted me by entrusting me with the arrangement of her house in order to overcome the clear contrast between the white colored rooms and the black of her grand piano. You know, minimalist architecture and environments were in fashion back then. Playing above all with light and shadows and introducing soft shades of color, I changed the environment of his home to make it more conducive to his creativity. From then until 1997 Gianna entrusted me with the design and creation of lights and colors of the houses in which she lived. This experience taught me that the color designer must not be someone who creates fashionable “trends”, but rather someone who understands and experiments with how color acts on the organism. That is, it does not treat color as an arbitrary imposition by the designer but experiments with it together with its client(s).

MEM – Since 2009 you have been President of IACC Italy

What is the IACC and what role does it play? What shape did you give to your presidency?

M.C. – I.A.C.C. stands for International Association of Color Consultants and Designers and was born in 1957 in Hilversum, the Netherlands, on the initiative of Dr. Heinrich Frieling, biologist, philosopher and founder of the German Institute for Color Psychology. He brought together around fifty authoritative experts in architecture, design, psychology, art and many other disciplines related to design, drawing up a specification and a training program for the new professional figure of the color designer. The initial aim was to stem the winter depressive syndrome affecting the Nordic countries, the leading cause of suicide. Since then the association has expanded around the world and arrived in Italy in 2009 when we formed the first nucleus; since then our educational work has never stopped, continually expanding. IACC Italia promotes sensitive design that combines art and science; yes, because ultimately we move with the spirit that animated Leonardo. Our approach is multidisciplinary since when designing a space we must take into account the emotional, ergonomic, neuropsychological and chromatic aspects that we trigger. The objective is to generate maximum integration between man and the environment by adding knowledge to existing professionalism. Ultimately, we propose a humanistic approach to disciplines perceived as merely technical.

 

MEM – With this in mind, IACC Italia starts its collaboration with MEM: what will it propose during its course?

M.C. – Our collaboration seemed natural to me, almost obvious: we share the same basic vision. And therefore: we will propose a multidisciplinary course that brings designers closer to color, focusing on harmonies and contrasts, on the ergonomics of color, on color theories with particular attention to practical cases and sharing projects. We will not explain everything, we will not reveal who knows what secrets, we will base ourselves on what science tells us today to arrive at the humanistic vision I was talking about before. Because color stands as a crossroads between art and science and has a social value.

What to do now

To be updated on the courses in collaboration with IACC held by Massimo Caiazzo. Sign up now on the waiting list to find out the dates of the course structured for MEM by Dr. Massimo Caiazzo, President of IACC Italia and Nello Marelli, Vice President of IACC Italia, to take advantage of all the promotions reserved for MEMbers!