The monkey runs all through the Fornasetti archive, on plates, on cabinets, on screens, and here it has been set into the dense leaf pattern the Milanese atelier drew for Chiavi Segrete. Foglie e Scimmie is that foliage with primates in it: half-hidden, watchful, arranged so that they are found rather than presented.
The leaves are handled in the flat graphic manner the archive is known for, layered over one another so that depth comes from overlap rather than shadow. The monkeys are drawn with more line and more incident, which is what lets them separate from the ground once you have noticed them. The roll is a wide 0.69 m and the repeat 57 cm with a straight match, so the canopy builds across a wall in broad courses and the joins fall inside the foliage rather than across it.
It wants a room with edges, where the canopy can meet itself in the corners and the joke of the hidden animals has time to land. A study, a small dining room, a bar, a cloakroom. Dark timber and low warm light suit it, and so does leaving the walls otherwise bare, since anything hung on them competes with the leaves.
