Sentinelle Gentili

My name is Sentinelle Gentili wallpaper, and I come from a free gesture: that of Gutai painting, where colour is not painted, it is lived, pressed, dragged across the surface until it vibrates. I am small upright figures, irregular staves, staggered totemic strokes, tall narrow slabs standing alone in an open field, without a file, without repetition, without twins.

Each of my shapes carries a unique mark: edges torn like ripped paper, overlaid passes that let a lighter underlayer show through, small cracks and falls of pigment at the base of the taller figures. Charcoal black, burnt earth, raw canvas white, a dull rust red and a touch of ochre: an earthy, matt, living palette, where the void around every shape counts as much as the mark itself.

In a child’s room I chose to let these small vertical inhabitants arrange themselves like distracted friends in a meadow, some gathered in a group, others alone in wide breathing space: no geometry to intimidate, only funny, reassuring presences that invite the eye to play, to count, to invent stories. It is an abstraction that speaks to children with the same naturalness with which it speaks to adults: an alphabet of shapes without rules, which trains the eye in freedom.

In the WallZad workshop every stroke is carried over with tailored care, respecting the raw material of the original gesture: the Sentinelle Gentili wallpaper thus keeps, on every wall, the same spontaneous energy and the same instinctive tenderness with which it was imagined.