Ceneri di Fornace

I call this continuous field of exposed handmade cotto the Ceneri di Fornace wallpaper: it belongs to the family of materials that tell of the craftsman's gesture even before the design. Across the surface, square and rectangular tiles of regular proportion follow one another in a close-coursed weave, the joints thin and barely perceptible, and every tile carries the unique mark of the wood-fired kiln it passed through: some stay pale, almost raw, where the fire barely touched them; others darken to obsidian, marked by clouds of smoke and slight browning at the edges; most live in the range of terracotta, between straw, ochre and brick.

It is the style of handmade wood-fired cotto that makes this variety possible: no electric kiln could return the same unpredictability, the same grain of sand and grog, the tiny pores, the fine craquelure, the living irregularity of every hand-formed edge. It is in this disobedience of fire, never the same twice, that I find the most honest measure of beauty: not sought-after uniformity, but the truth of a material that let heat pass through it and carries the memory of it.

In the Ceneri di Fornace wallpaper, WallZad returns that memory with the care of those who know the difference between imitating matter and understanding it: every variation of colour, every shadow of relief, is faithfully rendered so as to accompany, without saturating, quiet contemporary rooms wherever they may be, with a surface that keeps on telling, close up as from a distance.