Cranio Tipografico

I sign Cranio Tipografico wallpaper as one signs a manifesto: certain that the human face, taken apart, says more than a thousand finished portraits. I belong to the spirit of Dada, the movement that in the early twentieth century dismantled art to reassemble it from the offcuts of modernity — gears, typography, fragments of printed paper — and refused every ordered beauty in favour of a rougher truth.

What I see is a monumental head, frontal, built like a collage-painting: angular planes of different faces — profiles, fixed eyes, half mouths — lock together with cogwheels, rivets, pistons, springs and metal plates, while stamped letters, newspaper type and numbers surface like clippings glued beneath the paint. Aged ochre, bone white, soot black, rust red and gunmetal grey make up a matt, oxidised palette that from a distance reads as a single powerful form and close up dissolves into a thousand details: fine engraving on the teeth of the gears, hatching that models every facet, cracks of enamel along the collage joints.

In my studio I wanted to render this density without betraying it, so that every fracture of a face kept its original tension. This is how Cranio Tipografico wallpaper enters a room: it does not decorate, it declares, like a work that goes on questioning whoever looks at it, line after line, gear after gear.