Sfere del Boulevard

The Sfere del Boulevard wallpaper comes from an evening of lights and voices, a painting that tells of the mingled warmth of a café-concert at the end of the century. I belong to Impressionism, to its urgency to catch the instant before it dissolves: here the scene is a crowded café-concert, round tables with marble tops pressed against one another, patrons in hats and evening dress, waiters slipping between the chairs, while rows of frosted globe lamps multiply in the great gilded mirrors and, at the back, a singer appears between the smoke and the gaslight.

The brushstrokes are quick, broken; they do not draw outlines but light up the light: faces dissolve into touches of colour, hands become marks, and the whole composes itself as a crowd seen from inside, dense, without gaps, with the brightest cluster near the stage leading the eye. Amber, ochre and burnt sienna burn against the cold blue of the jackets and the slate grey of the shadows, dotted with vivid reds on cheeks and ties.

To live beneath this wallpaper is to inhabit a fragment of an older sociability, the evening as shared theatre, the warmth of many bodies close together that time has turned into poetry. It is a subject that does not age: the party, the music, the artificial light that promises company. WallZad has reproduced every touch of impasto on the globes, every veil of smoke, with the photographic care of those who know the value of painted matter, giving the wall the same vibration found only before a real painting.