Matteo Brioni Clay Surfaces
Matteo Brioni produces and supervises the application of natural surfaces for architecture: from natural clay plaster and mass-coloured earthen floors to clay paints. Matteo Brioni products are made from the purest clays. The production of natural surfaces is based on the selection of colouring clays, where Matteo Brioni exploits a know-how accumulated by his family through generations of experience in the brickyards of ancient Mantuan tradition. Matteo Brioni is in fact a spin-off of Laterizi Brioni in Gonzaga, a family business since 1920. Pursuing a self-sufficient course of minimal environmental impact, Matteo Brioni has implemented research projects for the use of natural clay as a building material offering the quality of ultrapure pigment. This research has enabled his firm to transform clay finishes into products ideally suited to the ‘natural’ cladding of architectural surfaces, while maintaining the highest performance expected of a contemporary facing product. Thanks to the know-how accumulated in decades of selecting clays in their diverse geological soil conformations, Matteo Brioni offers a rich geography of colours for architecture. Pepe nero, for example, owes its shades of grey to lava ash, while Cipria reflects the pinkish tones of Sardinia’s earth, and Senape the burnished hues of Sienese chalks. Natural clay is not only the world’s most ancient building material, as witnessed by the examples of earthen architecture in all latitudes, from Japan to Mexico and from India to Africa; it is also the earliest pigment used by humans to colour themselves and their surroundings. Since prehistory in fact earths have been used for colouring. Thanks to the crystalline structure of their mineral components, earthen surfaces have a special quality of reaction to light which manmade colourings cannot easily reproduce.
Colours
Matteo Brioni Arazzi Decorative Wall Panels
Arazzi is a system of decorative clay modular surfaces, inspired by a contemporary idea of modules and geometry. Although coated with natural clay these modules are actually wooden frames, on which the clay is ‘warped’ thanks to the manual expertise of Matteo Brioni’s applicators. Arazzi’s basic idea is that of a boiserie in the shape of a three-dimensional, mono-material clay wall ‘picture’: a series-manufactured unique piece offering endless scope for variation and uses.
