Piero Fornasetti's method was to take a single image and run it through endless variation, and two of his subjects meet here. Fruit had been in the atelier's work since the 1940s, appearing on plates, trays and cabinets. The chessboard came later, as a way of testing what the eye does with a regular grid. Frutta e Geometrico sets one on top of the other.
The grid is drawn in hard perspective, receding and tilting so that it never sits flat, and the fruit is laid over it in full modelled line, round and organic and obviously three-dimensional. The contrast is the whole design: rigid against soft, ruled against drawn, one illusion against another. The half-drop match keeps the grid from stacking into columns, and at 64 cm on a 0.52 m roll the repeat is large enough that the eye does not immediately find its edges.
It is a design for people who want their walls to be interesting rather than restful. A dining room, a hall, a downstairs cloakroom, a bar. Give it plain furniture and a single strong light source, because the trompe l'oeil depends on shadow and too much reflected light from a pale room flattens the grid out.
