Cisterna di Palenque

It is born of an ancient and necessary gesture, water gathered and kept: my Cisterna di Palenque wallpaper, a frontal, silent architecture that gives the wall the same calm strength as a work built to last.

The style belongs to the Maya world, a constructive grammar that joins measure and sacredness in its handling of stone and lime. The subject is precise: a plastered water tank whose thick quicklime walls rise as a single unbroken plane, crossed at the top by a row of narrow channels pouring water into the basin below; on one side a broad stone stairway descends in regular steps to the waterline, which doubles its profile in a barely perceptible reflection.

I wanted to leave the scars of time intact: the fine cracks in the plaster, the patchings, the mineral efflorescence running down from the channels, the bevelled edge of every step, the horizontal marks left by water rising and falling. They are the signs of living matter, not of a polished image.

In this wallpaper I recognise an idea of threshold: between the dry and the liquid, between building and the time that wears it away. It is a surface that tells not of an ornament but of a function raised to a monument, able to give a wall the same quiet as a place that has always waited for water.

As with every WallZad design, the rendering comes from minute craft work: only in this way can the large scale and the minute material live together without betraying each other, returning real depth and not a printed illusion.