Vespro delle Spigolatrici

In the Vespro delle Spigolatrici wallpaper I find again the breath of the Macchiaioli, the school of painting that in nineteenth-century Tuscany challenged the academy with the truth of real light. It is that style which tells here of a line of four or five countrywomen returning from the fields at sunset, along a dirt track between dry-stone walls and scattered olive trees: the long skirts and knotted headscarves become broad silhouettes, the wicker baskets balanced on a hip or on the head, while rows of cut stubble recede towards a low horizon, under an amber sky sliding into violet.

It is not a scene, it is a gesture repeated for generations: the return, the composed labour in the step, the late-afternoon light settling without hesitation on bent shoulders and on the woven rims of the baskets. The patch of colour, laid in squared touches and never blended, gives me back the truth a trained eye recognises even at a distance, and which becomes intimate in the detail of the tired folds, the bare feet, the wrists gripping a handle.

In composing this Vespro delle Spigolatrici wallpaper I wanted every interior, from the private house to the hotel suite, to be able to hold this fragment of painterly truth on a single large free wall, like a picture that does not repeat. WallZad tends its printing as one guards a painting: faithful pigments, a recognisable painterly surface, tailored measure for every wall that receives it.