Bersagli di Giada

I call this natural shield Bersagli di Giada wallpaper, and I have chosen to bring it to a monumental scale, because its minute geometry hides a design worthy of a great mural decoration. It belongs to the family of insects, a tiny world that here expands to fill an entire wall without losing any of its precision.

The subject is the dorsal shield of the so-called Picasso bug, the rounded pentagon that covers the animal's back: eleven concentric targets, each built from rings of deep black, burnt orange and cream, set in an irregular pattern that rises from the broad shoulders to the tapered tip. The surface, glossy as lacquer, moves from the acid yellow of the margins to the bottle green of the centre, while a very fine grain, almost hexagonal facets and small specular highlights tell, close up, of the living matter of chitin.

In this shield I see a lesson in spontaneous order: nature painting without a brush, composing symmetries the human eye struggles to invent on its own. That is why I wanted to fix it on the wall, not as an entomological curiosity but as a painting in its own right, able to fill the eye from a distance and then hold it in the details. Every WallZad fabric that prints this Bersagli di Giada wallpaper is calibrated to render faithfully the waxy sheen of these rings, so that the wall, in whatever room it is placed, keeps the same optical precision as the original drawing.