The owl was one of Piero Fornasetti's favourite subjects, and it is easy to see why. A creature that sees in the dark has been read as wisdom and foresight for as long as anyone has been drawing it, and it carries an ambivalence that suited him. It appears across the atelier's porcelain and accessories, and here it has been set into the leaf pattern first drawn for Chiavi Segrete.
The foliage is dense and worked flat, layer over layer, and the owls are placed within it rather than on it, facing outward, evenly spaced, but never quite where you expect them. That is the mechanism of the design. On first reading it is a leaf pattern; on the second it is watching you. Because the birds are drawn with the same weight of line as the leaves, they emerge slowly and keep emerging, which is why a wall of it does not exhaust itself.
Small dark rooms suit it: a study, a cloakroom, a snug, the back of a bar. It is not a paper for a single wall, because the effect depends on being surrounded. Hung throughout, with warm low light and almost nothing else on the walls, it becomes an atmosphere rather than a decoration.
