Cardo Sanguigno

I am born of a single gesture, that of the red chalk sliding across the sheet: the Cardo Sanguigno wallpaper tells of a wild thistle drawn as a sanguine study, monochrome red-brown on an ivory ground, where every toothed leaf and every filament of the flower head still seems to vibrate with the stroke that made it.

I am not a domesticated flower but a spontaneous presence, almost proud in my asymmetry: I sit off centre, I let my branches and my thorns run past the margin, so that nothing in me appears contained or framed. It is this continual overstepping, this repeating without a break, that gives me the rhythm of a garden that knows no boundaries.

In the grain of the chalk, in the fine hatching that models shadow and volume, I recognise the time of the atelier: the slow time of the hand, not the quick time of the screen. It is the same time WallZad gives to every surface, where a painterly technique is carefully translated into matter for the wall, ready to last.

I live well in wide, welcoming spaces, such as the entrance of a hotel where the light is warm and the step slows: there my terracotta, my sanguine brown, my old ochre speak with the ivory of the ground to build a sober elegance, never loud. From a distance I am a decided, recognisable botanical drawing; close up, a texture that invites you to stop and look more carefully.

I choose the Cardo Sanguigno wallpaper for those who want even a thorny detail to become refinement, the memory of a drawing made by hand, now kept on a wall.