Scatto Cobalto

I am the Scatto Cobalto wallpaper, the exact instant in which the body leaves the starting blocks and throws itself along a diagonal that rises from one corner of the wall to the other, like a gesture caught in flight by Second Futurism

I look at myself and see a single sprinter: the torso leaning forward, the driving leg stretched along the track, the other still gathered against the block, the arms thrown in opposite counter-thrust, the head set into the line of the shoulders. Behind me three echoes of the same pose are staggered, repeated as only the Futurist multiplication of movement knew how, each a little further away than the last. Straight lines run from the rear foot to the opposite corner, carrying the eye from one end of the surface to the other.

The colour is decisive and held back: a deep cobalt blue ground, the burnt terracotta of the skin and of the track, the flat white of the vest and of the lane lines, the black of every outline, and a single red, lit only on the starting block and on the fist that leads the run. Close up, the gouache shows its own dry skin, the small ridge where the brush lifted, the slight tremor of a line drawn twice.

In my workshop I chose to leave this held energy intact: whoever lives with the Scatto Cobalto wallpaper brings into their room not a childhood game but the adult, sure tension of the sprint, suspended forever a step from the finish.