Bulino di Biancospino

I sign the Bulino di Biancospino wallpaper as one signs an engraved plate: with the steady hand of someone who knows the weight of every line. It comes from an ancient gesture, that of the burin and the drypoint, which cuts into metal to bring back into the light trifoliate leaves, toothed lobes and fine thorns, suspended on a warm ground of lime and pale stone.

I have not drawn a garden but its graphic memory: the hawthorn that grows at the edge of English hedges, caught not in its flower but in the minute structure of its foliage, in the close hatching that marks the veins, in the burin that gathers shadow where the leaf folds over itself. Deep green-black and burnt sepia speak to each other like ink on parchment, without gradients, without perspective: only the density of the mark builds volume.

In the hotel lobbies I like to imagine, this weave becomes a silent threshold: from a distance a graphic tapestry of great breadth, close up an engraving to be studied leaf by leaf, thorn by thorn, like a botanical illustration found again in an old library. It is a motif that does not ask for attention; it deserves it.

At WallZad every plate is treated with the care reserved for a work on paper: the calibration of the black, the texture of the burin, the continuity of the line from one edge to the other, so that the wallpaper shows no seams, only a single engraved breath wrapping the wall and, with it, whoever lives there.