Fuga Metropolitana

I sign the Fuga Metropolitana wallpaper as a freeze-frame taken from the heart of an underground train, at the exact instant the doors close. The design belongs to Screentone Ink, the dotted screen tone that comics made their own: decided, closed black outlines hold every panel, every rubber seal, every chromed handle as a flat, definitive shape, while the screen tone builds the shadow of the steel and the darkness of the tunnel receding.

At the centre of the scene, two faces of sliding doors move towards each other along a corridor narrowing into a steep perspective: the seals are about to touch at the exact centre of the sheet, the rivets line up towards a single vanishing point, the handrails and the floor lines converge hard to right and left. A yellow warning strip, the industrial grey-blue of the panels, the safety red of the edge lights: four inks only, each printed in a single pass, with the natural misregistration that reveals the hand that pulled every colour.

It is an image of a threshold, of movement stopped an instant before it completes itself, and it speaks to anyone who lives their own room as a way station towards adulthood. In our workshop, the wallpaper is printed and finished with the same craft care the screen tone requires, so that every dot stays crisp from the largest scale down to the finest detail.