Grand Carpet

Ceramic stoneware, a material capable of amazing performances, is constantly adopting more and more sophisticated production technologies, extending its tile sizes and geometrical forms. It is a tough, neutral, healthy, recyclable material, with surfaces that can evoke and reproduce a limitless range of visual effects. Marazzi Group, with the design of Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel, turned to the oriental decorative tradition for a design theme able to bring out all the beauty of the large slab size and the warm nature of the ceramic body material. Grand Carpet combines the style of oriental carpet patterns with inputs from the Kolam tradition of ephemeral rice floor decorations, and Mehindi, the Indian temporary ritual tattoos. They see antique but transient decoration, which reinforces and evokes a sense of place and pays homage to a rite of belonging, as ideal for our aim of adding value to a material without letting the decoration as such predominate over its actual substance. The gigantic scale, the fragmentation of the pattern, and the versatility of the geometrical composition of the parts, not necessarily obliged to make up a formal figure all reinforce the impression of symbolic decoration. The pattern is applied using a contemporary method based on dots, a printing screen or pixels; the graphic language, with its strong kinship to modernity, introduces the theme of visual perception in the horizontal perspective of the floor covering. The pattern becomes an evanescent perception, changing depending on viewpoint and not static. Above all, it is closely integrated with the tactile values of the flooring material itself. Grand Carpet overcomes the paradox that often afflicts decoration in architecture, which must be neutral and yet still reinforce the project’s character and aims, and remain in the background yet be highly relevant in attributing identity and recognition to space. Grand Carpet is a stoneware ideal for floor and wall surfaces in indoor and outdoor spaces with the facility to create unbroken visual continuity between indoors/outdoors, both in public and commercial spaces and it is an eco-sustainable product created with a closed-cycle production process.

www.marazzigroup.com