Fendente di Ocra

I sign the Fendente di Ocra wallpaper with pride, an image that does not describe an athletic gesture but carves it into the air, held for ever at the most strained instant of the movement. In language and structure it belongs to second futurism: angular planes locking together like splinters, speed lines opening out in a fan, no gradation to mediate between one shape and the next.

The subject is a footballer caught mid-kick, one leg raised in full extension, the torso twisted hard against his own momentum, arms open for balance, chin lifted. He rises from a low, thin horizon, so that head and shoulders break into the upper field and the body fills almost the whole height of the sheet: the ball stays small, just in front of the boot, suspended like a staccato note in the void. The sky around him stays calm and open, leaving the movement of the figure to govern the whole composition.

The palette keeps to a few decided shades — ochre, brick red, cobalt, bone white, black — each laid down as an independent field, never blended with its neighbour: close up you find the stitched panels of the ball, the dense hatching that suggests muscle and the fold of cloth, the slightly irregular edge where one colour meets another. The energy is held back and explosive at once, suited to a room that asks for drive without noise. In the WallZad workshop every plane of colour is calibrated by hand before it reaches the wall, so that a gesture this swift is given the same care as things meant to last.