Art on commission in companies

Corporate commissioning

Companies commission art. For new headquarters, for product launches, for trade fairs. Often with serious intentions and results of quality. But in most cases the work begins and ends in an event, an installation, a scenographic presence. Afterwards, nothing remains that builds identity over time. The problem is not the quality of the work; it is the absence of a cultural project. A company may have extraordinary materials to communicate, an industrial history spanning decades, a strong identity. And it can still commission art that says nothing about itself, because no one has translated that identity into artistic language. The artist works without roots and the work decorates instead of meaning. When art does not originate from the company but is applied on top of it, it remains foreign. It may be beautiful. It cannot be its own.

The right artist for that company. The commission does not begin from the work; it begins from the choice of the artist. The search is not for a name but for a compatibility: between the artist’s language and the company’s materials, between the scale of the work and the space in which it will live, between the artist’s sensibility and the philosophy of whoever commissions. Without this affinity the work remains applied. Decorative. And therefore confined to the space of the event. For Nexion, an Italian-Indian company specialising in sintered ceramic surfaces, the choice fell on Dario Tironi. The work originates directly from the materials produced: fragments of tiles produced in the factory, layered like sedimentary rock, until a female figure emerges. Fairy Tiles, 2022, does not represent Nexion from the outside; it is made of Nexion.

Works that remain. Fairy Tiles by Dario Tironi is today installed at the Nexion headquarters in Correggio. The sculpture is made from tile fragments from the production process: the company’s industrial material becomes artistic matter and returns to the space that generated it. The project did not stop at a single episode. Since 2023 the work continues as an ongoing programme. Each year a different Indian artist interprets the company’s materials and philosophy in a sculpture presented at India Design, New Delhi, before entering the Bangalore headquarters. At the fourth edition, these are no longer events: they are heritage in construction. This approach to commissioning is not limited to a single case. Art Consulting develops analogous projects with several industrial companies, among them Iris Ceramica Group and other Italian manufacturing firms, where art originates from materials, processes and productive identity. When this happens, the work does not remain an event: it becomes part of the history of the enterprise.