Cattedrale di Alerce

It comes about like this, among the columns of fissured bark of thousand-year-old alerces, the Cattedrale di Alerce wallpaper: an image I bring home as one brings home a travel memory, and which here takes the precise form of a forest. It belongs to the great family of landscapes, in the group I call forest, and it portrays exactly a stretch of Valdivian temperate rainforest — the ancient trunks of the alerces, the rust-red bark split into deep plates, a dominant trunk slightly off centre guiding the eye while other slenderer trunks dissolve into a distant haze.

At the foot of the trunks the nalca leaves, broad as umbrellas, overlap on the ground in low ordered rows; from above hang long beards of moss, vertical threads crossing the middle depth like a natural curtain. The colour is the forest's own — red oxides, umber, emerald and olive green, the grey-green of lichens, a golden light softening the background — and close up the texture reveals every vein, every fibre of moss, every crack in the bark.

To live each day beside this wallpaper, which still carries Alerce in its name, is to inhabit an ancient quiet, that of places in no hurry. This is the discreet gesture of WallZad: to return, with Italian craftsmanship, the silent density of a forest that knows no time.