While designers, like artists and architects, often draw upstream of their projects, the doodle – a random drawing made without thinking during telephone conversations – does not generally attract the attention of creators.
Adrien Rovero conceives doodles as autonomous extensions of his design practice. However, these drawings are not made by hand, but are the result of the adaptation of a CNC (computer numerical control) machine, originally intended for designing volume objects. Reprogrammed, the machine is now able to produce drawings in coloured ink: the designer gives it a 3D shape that it must interpret, choosing its path to create the voids and solids.
Some of these drawings refer explicitly to objects produced by Rovero, such as the Lausanne chair for Pfister or the Yo Ga rug for Chic Cham, but the majority of them seem to free themselves from a direct relationship to the object to evoke as many masks as colours used.
Each elegant drawing is signed and inserted into a silicone frame specially designed by the designer. Unlike a real doodle, which is often aimless, some of the drawings traced by the CNC machine end up elsewhere in Rovero’s practice. For example, they are scanned to become the patterns for ceramic tiles produced by Cerdisa. The doodle then reaches into eternity, forever set in cement.
