Sinfonia Balneare

So it comes, from the crowd and the light, the Sinfonia Balneare wallpaper: a human expanse that takes up every inch of the scene, without gaps, without pauses, as only certain summer Sundays can be. I belong to American Realism, the school that was able to look at ordinary life — city beaches, working crowds on holiday — without idealising it, giving back instead its true density, its warmth, its vital disorder.

What I see, and what I bring to the wall, is an urban beach packed to bursting: bathers in striped costumes of another age, bodies lying shoulder to shoulder on the towels, groups splashing along the shore, and dozens of beach umbrellas — round, scallop-edged — planted in close, irregular rows that fade towards a pale horizon, where the sea mists over and the sky blurs into a milky white. Above, barely sketched, a distant pier and the roofs of the bathing establishments close the composition. Close up, the brushstroke dissolves into decisive gestures — a straw hat, a wicker basket, the scalloped edge of an umbrella — but from a distance everything returns to mass, rhythm, multitude.

Mine is a choral portrait: it tells of the human need to be together, even pressed close, even crowded, if only to look for sun and relief. In any interior where it finds a place, Sinfonia Balneare asks for no order, but gives back vitality. WallZad has kept its painted matter — pigments, light, surface — reproducing it with the same faithful craftsmanship it gives to every work chosen for the walls of those who know how to look.