Frutto Proibito assembles several Fornasetti motifs from the 1940s and 50s into one composition. The monkeys were first drawn as decorative wooden panels for Dulciora, a Milanese patisserie; here they have been lifted out and set among the sprawling branches of a pomegranate tree, reaching for the fruit. The reach is never completed, which is the joke the title makes and the reason the composition stays in motion.
What is characteristic is the mixture of registers. The pomegranates and foliage are rendered as fine etchings, cross-hatched and tonal and almost scientific in their precision, while the grounds are laid in as flat, saturated blocks of colour. The two do not resolve into a single illusion and are not meant to. The eye moves between the drawn detail and the printed field, which is exactly the tension Piero Fornasetti spent a career building. Warm light suits the flat grounds.
It is a paper for a room that is looked at rather than lived in for long stretches: a dining room, a cloakroom, a hall, a small library. Hung on every wall it becomes an environment; on one wall it becomes a picture, and either reading works. Keep the furniture plain and the lighting warm.
