Cadenza Dorica

In the Cadenza Dorica wallpaper I wanted to hold the slow, solemn step of a colonnade receding towards a single vanishing point, as though time itself were advancing in file, marked out by fluted columns identical and yet alive with small differences. Each shaft rises with its subtle entasis, rests on a bare abacus and carries an architrave bearing the binary rhythm of triglyphs and metopes up to the cyma, where a corner of pediment can be sensed against the sky.

The stone is warm: travertine and quarried limestone bleached almost to ivory on the faces struck by the sun, turning in the flutes to a cold grey-blue and a brown shadow, with glazes of ochre marking the time that has passed over the cornice. Close up one finds the sharp arris of every flute, the flush margins between blocks, minute cracks and lichens that tell of centuries of light and rain. It is architecture photographed as one photographs a living relic, with flat frontal light that hides nothing.

Brought into a bright living room, this Cadenza Dorica wallpaper does not furnish: it builds perspective, it widens the space with the same discipline with which a temple organises its peristyle. At WallZad every joint, every shadow, every shade of ochre is calibrated by hand before printing, because classical grandeur deserves the same care given to real stone.