André Ricard, the designer of beautiful and useful things

The documentary André Ricard, invisible design captures the trajectory of this forerunner of industrial design dedicated to designing the humblest things and democratizing beauty.

That the everyday utensils we use work in the best possible way is the craze that has pushed the designer André Ricard to create useful things. Born in Barcelona in 1929, as a child he became interested in the way things were. A madness that has made him one of the fathers of industrial design in Spain and an internationally renowned benchmark. Attracted by the Bauhaus school and an admirer of Raymond Loewy, André Ricard declares himself a self-taught person because when he started design schools did not exist and his way of doing it has forged him by talking to people and observing a lot.

André Ricard has built a look away from the impending imperatives of marketing, he has not sought to make any revolution but to achieve an evolution. For all this, André Ricard is a key figure in industrial design, a man who has done many things, including promoting the FAD, and whose now, thanks to the documentary made by Poldo Pomés with a screenplay by Xavier Mas de Xaxàs, we can know more things.

"We should not be ashamed and design the humblest things. It is in everyday utensils that we can do more, and there is still a lot to do! ”, Remarked the industrial designer André Ricard on the day of the presentation of the documentary André Ricard, the invisible design in the Santa & Cole gallery in Barcelona.

By André Ricard, National Design Award (1987), Knight of the Order of the Legion of Honor in France and awarded this year with the Design Europe Award granted by the European Union, what is at stake is to make things that we use work in the best possible way. Perhaps that is why in the presentation of the documentary it was not said that at present "time is being wasted on nonsense when there are many essential things pending to be resolved."

He has done many things, probably his most emblematic work is to have designed the Barcelona 92 Olympic torch; but its catalog is full of everyday objects, such as the Moulinex mixer, rounded edge switches, the anti-moth clamp to hang in the most famous cupboard on the market, many milk containers that stand out because they are easy to grab. Ricard is also the father of iconic pieces such as the Copenhagen ashtray or the Tatu lamp. And what he has dedicated many hours to is creating the bottles of the Puig brand colonies, such as the one in Agua Brava, of which Miró made a sculpture so beautiful and poetic that he found it.

When asked what he would have liked to do and has not done, he replies that he feels a healthy envy for the vinegars designed by Rafael Marquina. Convinced that ideas are there and that you only have to look for them, André Ricard defends that the things that work are discreet, and it is precisely “when an object works well that it achieves beauty”. That is why he defends that "beauty is a consequence, not an end."