Cenere e Cedro

I conceived the Cenere e Cedro wallpaper as a fragment of lived matter, brought home without losing any of its truth. It belongs to the world of Materials and comes from yakisugi, the old Japanese technique of charred cedar: full-height vertical boards, aligned edge to edge with fine joints, whose surface tells of fire and time together.

The design shows exactly that: panels blackened by combustion, cracked like crocodile skin, in which the char has burnt away unevenly to let patches of grey, almost silvery wood appear, with fine warm umber veins filtering through at the most worn points. There is no repetition: every board has its own asymmetrical, natural rhythm, so that the eye finds not a motif but a living surface, to be read from a distance in its dark strength and close up in its fine cracks, in the ridges of exposed grain, in the ember-coloured dust caught in the deepest fissures.

It is a material that speaks of resistance: wood that lets itself burn in order to protect itself, that wears the scar as a virtue. In every room where it is hung — a house, a studio, a hotel wall — it gives back the essential calm of authentic surfaces, able to hold the eye with no need of further decoration. In the care with which we return every crack and every lightening of the grain lies the craft gesture of WallZad, which translates real matter into a surface to be lived with every day.