The living-sleeping room in American artist Ronaldo Ferri’s studio back in the 1960s was like a painting in three dimensions — an op-art triumph.
With his characteristic bravura, he shunned the classical restraint and symmetry that the handsomely proportioned room would normally suggest, and totally transformed the space with color.
Every vertical surface in this uniquely artistic living room he painted blue — moldings, mantel, window frames, shutters and all. The horizontal surfaces he painted white — even the parquet floor.
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When it came to furnishings, Ferri splurged on two designs he loved: an Italian floor lamp and a marble-top coffee table (“To me, they are pieces of sculpture”). But everything else in the room is a product of imagination and making do.
He covered his bed, every inch of it, with a fabric that matched the walls so exactly that the bed has, in effect, been painted out of the picture.
The blue walls intensified the whiteness of a canvas officer’s chair, giving it an elegance out of proportion to its modest cost.
The lacquered red table next to it was cut from a cardboard carton, and the zebra rug, with its red sawtooth edging, he had simply painted on the floor.
