He covered the chair completely with a colorful, handpainted swarm of dots which reproduced an enlarged section of a Pointillist painting by Paul Signac. Impressionism, which attempted to recreate the atmospheric appearance of nature through painting, was highly valued by Proust, and its presence here is a reference to the author and his time. However, by equally painting all parts of the chair, irrespective of their structure and purpose, Mendini succeeds in citing not only Impressionism but also the Baroque, using the infinite as a central motif. Impressionist painting and the Baroque are imitated and trivialized in the pattern of the “Poltrona di Proust,” turning the chair into a flickering vision imbued with meaning. Classic design qualities such as originality, a functional construction, or cost-saving production are thereby fundamentally called into question. The armchair was originally conceived as the only one of its kind, but variations were later manufactured by Mendini’s studio as individual pieces or in limited editions. MSC