Wall patterns and reliefs with ceramic tiles by Atlas Concorde

The days when being fashionably minimalist began by washing rooms with white have long gone. Just as minimalism has acquired shades and degrees, so has its favoured wall-colour. A growing number of heritage paint brands offer a baffling number of white shades with which to pimp your paring-back. And now, with an increased need for our interiors to stimulate all our senses in multifarious ways, a more textured, sculptural minimalism has emerged that decorates with light and shadow, opening up new possibilities to interior architects designing the bones of a building beautifully.

Walls have recently gained just such a textural treatment with the launch of Atlas Concorde’s 3D Wall Carve, a collection of ceramic tiles benefiting from the collaborative eye of Italian design legend Piero Lissoni. ‘I like the idea of the vibration that occurs when light is interrupted, when lines of shadows are created and then vanish, giving voice to light, both natural and artificial,’ he enthuses. The interaction between light and shadow is no accident – the relief and patterns of 3D Wall Carve were carefully investigated to maximise the scenic impact and allow for visual continuity.

Inspired by the micro-reliefs of natural stone, the patterns of the collection are designed to have artisanal allure, all sealed under an innovative glaze, painstakingly developed by Atlas Concorde laboratories. Its finesse is to allow every detail to be highlighted, while maintaining the raw opacity of untreated stone and a softness to the touch. While 3D Chisel features apparently hand-hewn horizontal stripes, 3D Whittle is a linear relief which suggests horizontal ribbons with an occasional twist to interrupt the flow, and 3D Leaf is a more figurative, carved representation of floating foliage.

For his two contributions to the collection, 3D Squares and 3D Sign, Lissoni focused sharply on the interplay between industrial processes, art and craft. Seeking to faithfully replicate the appearance of hand-crafted stone, in very technical, high-functioning ceramic tiles, he looked back into art history for his inspiration.

‘While wanting to create a new generation of ceramic wall tiles projected into the future, we actually started from the distant past and an apparently different world: sixteenth-century engravings and art. In our minds, we travelled back to when works began with graffiti, carvings and developed our ideas from there.’ says the designer.

3D Sign is an abstract relief of soft-edged shapes – dashes and dots, squares and gaps, all jigsawed together and somehow feeling familiar, while 3D Squares is an interpretation of ancient micro-mosaic tiling, worn by the centuries, chipped around the edges. It incorporates something Lissoni describes as ‘controlled error’.

‘This concept involves constant attention to technological scalability, but there's also a kind of artistic delicacy. Producing ceramic tiles is an industrial enterprise, but producing them while also balancing this more technical aspect with artistic style is a challenge.’

The team’s efforts have been rewarded with a final product that adapts readily to different uses and environments. ‘For me, surfaces are also objects, and as such they must thrive in different worlds,’ says Lissoni. ‘I can imagine them at home, in public spaces, even places with a lot of traffic like hotels, bars, and restaurants.’

Produced in suitably neutral shades of white, ivory or pearl and crafted so that the joins are cleverly camouflaged by the design, the flexibility of the sculptural tiling is sealed. ‘As a designer, I don't think of objects locked into a single scenario. What matters is that the light caresses them, and wherever this happens, they work.’ Who wants a plain old blank canvas, when you can have one subtly enhanced by a sculptural relief, which paints a wall with light and shadow.

© Architonic