Piero Fornasetti drew this motif in 1954 for a screen he called Geometrico, and it is the most abstract thing in the atelier's repertoire. The subject is the chessboard, but the board is never left flat. It tilts, folds, recedes and turns back on itself, so the eye is continually being asked to decide which plane it is looking at.
It is a study in perceptual illusion made with almost no means: a grid, two values, and a great deal of control over perspective. There is no ornament, no figure and no narrative, which makes it an outlier in a body of work otherwise built on collage and reference. What keeps it recognisably Fornasetti is the wit. The illusions are set up deliberately to be caught out, and the design is more entertaining the longer it is looked at.
It can be hung on its own as a piece of hard geometry, or run alongside Frutta e Geometrico, where the same grid appears beneath drawn fruit and the two papers read as one idea taken in two directions. Either way it wants plain surroundings, a hall, a cloakroom, a stair or a bar, and a room where the walls are allowed to be the strongest thing in it.
