Progressione di Terracotta

I call this design the Progressione di Terracotta wallpaper because in it time itself seems to take a form: that of a breath widening, lobe after lobe, until it fills the whole wall. It belongs to the Quatrefoil style, that of rosettes with four rounded lobes meeting at a common centre and closing in a clean cusp: here I imagined them in a single horizontal procession, tiny and dense on one side, ever larger and further apart towards the other, like a chorus thinning into a few solemn voices.

Colour follows this journey: terracotta and ochre succeed one another in neighbouring tones, almost imperceptible in the transition, until the larger shapes light up with a deep ink blue, the only chromatic break the design allows itself. It is a gradation made for the eye, not for contrast: every shade supports the next, and the whole reads as one wave, not as a mosaic of fragments.

Close to, the surface reveals a fine outline retracing every lobe and every cusp, and the small rosettes, which from a distance seemed a compact fabric, resolve into distinct figures. It is in this double gaze — the whole and the detail — that I recognise the craft work of WallZad: in the care with which every line was traced so that it would hold up both at a distance and close to. Applied to a large free wall, the Progressione di Terracotta wallpaper turns the room into a space where the eye can choose, each time, at what distance to stop.