Italian artist and designer Ivan Baj (1957) is creative director of the brand Arcade, which he founded in 1989. Ivan has designed Arcade’s Murano glasses alongside international artists and designers including Laura de Santillana, Paola Navone and Marcello Panza, having been in the hands of maestro Andrea Zilio for the past thirty years. Arcade’s pieces were exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay and the Beaubourg in Paris, at the Venice Glass Week, at Palazzo Litta and the Triennale in Milan, and are permanently held in the collection of the Museo del Vetro in Murano.
Since its inception in 1990 ARCADE’s history has been punctuated by encounters: between the founder Ivan Baj and numerous glass masters, between water and sand, sea and earth, fresh and brackish waters, between matter and steam, form and colour. Every vase possesses a poetic potential, if only it is envisaged as a fusion of sand and human blow. ARCADE is experimentation, amalgam of malleable materials. Excavated waves, air, earth and plants. Subtraction of details. ARCADE is a constellation of sharp postherds and chromatic undertows. Every collection is a journey, every object a recollection of encounters.