Spine Gentili

I sign the Spine Gentili wallpaper as a small act of wonder: prickly pear pads laden with fruit, drawn in linocut with thick outlines and full colour areas, chasing one another dense and regular across the whole surface, without gaps, without pauses.

Each pad is a small plant architecture: the spines, here, do not prick, they become a gentle weave, a filigree of clean marks that tells of the Mediterranean scrub with the frankness of an old stamp. The fruit, whole and halved, shows its juicy flesh in touches of citron and blood orange, dotted with bottle-green leaves and small flowers as white as lime.

I thought of a child's room full of clear light, where play and rest alternate unhurried: so I chose a dense but light rhythm, flat and frontal without perspective, so the design reads from a distance as a sunlit song and close up reveals the almost tactile pleasure of the cut, every seed, every vein carved into the substance of the colour.

Sea blue and terracotta balance the lemon yellow and the leaf green, giving depth without weighing down the air of a room meant for growing up. It is a stubborn, happy garden that asks no permission: it grows to the edge of the wall and carries on beyond, as it does in nature.

In the WallZad atelier every plate is calibrated by hand so the outlines stay clean and the colours vivid even over large surfaces: the wallpaper becomes a small Mediterranean tale, tailored for whoever will live with it every day.