Some stories are meant to be read not while sitting snuggled up in your favourite armchair, but by touch, gently trailing your fingers over a slightly imperfect surface whose very imperfection makes it intriguing and laden with meaning.
This is the story of Mélange and of the other five series that Ragno has gathered together in Storie, a collection that has all the feel of age-old materials, the dust of artisan workshops and long days of intense, measured work.
Storie collections follow the footsteps of a tradition which we long to embrace again today in our modern, functional homes. Mélange, like the other series in the collection, offers an industrial ceramics interpretation of ancient grandeur, consolidated over centuries of craftsmanship.
The term Moroccan tiles, thanks to a simple flexing of the memory and the imagination, immediately conjures up images of a mixture of intense colours and glossy surfaces with a subtly irregular glaze, perceptible in the three-dimensional form and accentuated by the changes in light over the course of the day.
The 10x10 size, offered in no fewer than nine colours with names powerfully evocative of a precise mood (Oltremare, Acquamarina, Bianco, Bordeaux, Beige, Teal, Kaki, Glicine, Nero) creates a pattern on walls that is regular yet dynamic at the same time.
This effect is due to the particular technological solution employed to define the edges of each element, which are perfectly straight while presenting a deliberate irregularity.
Imperfection thus becomes a dominant aesthetic characteristic, so much so as to feature in details no longer visible after installation. The back of the tiles, in actual fact, features small gaps in the material that simulate chisel work, a nod to the tool originally used to finish the archetypal ceramic tiles that are the inspiration behind the Mélange collection.
Finally, the modernity of the offering lies not only in the reinterpretation of a great craftsmanship heritage, but also in the technological virtues of the new material: while its aesthetic is deliberately shifting, its characteristics of resistance, waterproof, easy cleaning, stability of finish and colour are fixed and unchanging.
