Sfaldatura Ferrigna

I conceived the Sfaldatura Ferrigna wallpaper as the faithful portrait of a metal skin that is opening before our eyes. It belongs to the materials family and tells of Corten steel, the weathering steel that air and damp turn into a living crust, unable to stay still.

Here the surface of a raw plate is covered by a first oxidised skin that comes away in loose, overlapping scales: some have already detached and lie free, others are still fused to the metal beneath, showing, where they have fallen, darker and smoother patches of bare steel. The composition is asymmetrical, denser on one side where the scales pile up in layers, sparser on the other, where isolated flakes thin out and let the grey-silver steel breathe. Burnt ochre, rust, blood umber and iron black alternate with a faint gleam of sulphur along the freshest edges of the oxidation.

It is not a decoration that imitates the material: it is the material itself, photographed head-on, light after light, to give back its grain, its hairline cracks, the minute relief of the bubbles and of the striations of the rolled plate. In any refined interior, home, office or hospitality space, this wall becomes a single surface, without repeats, able to be read from a distance as a wide gesture and close up as an endless detail. It is here that the trade of WallZad becomes the discreet keeper of the truth of the material, giving it back intact on the wall.