No matter how much the technique evolves, sometimes it is necessary to look back, to recognize in the origins what once made the ceramic tile unique.
Argillae is a love song to the pure material: clay.
Its surface and texture are the result of the harmony between the craftsman’s hand and the soil, a surface of imperfect beauty that extracts its colours from the clay, full of passion and poetry.
“Clay can be dirt in the wrong hands, but it can be art in the right one”
The idea for the new Ape Grupo collection came from the brilliant mind and creativity of the famous Luigi Romanelli.
Born in Rovereto di Trento in 1960 and graduated in Architecture at the IUAV in Venice, where he was taught by highly renowned professors like Aldo Rossi. Working out of his studio in the very core of the Italian tile industry in Sassuolo, he has undertaken architectural projects working with some of the leading international brands.
In recent decades ceramic tiles have made a long journey, to become one of the supports that best reproduces any material we can imagine. In this collection I wanted to take a journey back to precisely that which evokes the millennial origins of ceramics: the work of clay.
Argillae’s development of materiality is an exploration of traditional ways of manually manipulating this material to produce tiles. It is an unindustrialized process, so the resulting surface is full of imperfections and, somehow, the hand of the artisan is evident on it. It is a material that speaks of our origins as human beings, of the first constructions and tools that appeared. On the other hand, something I wanted to highlight are the reddish pigments typical of these lands, a warm color palette, full of passion. It’s a matter of reproducing the emotional impact of the handcrafted material, but with the precision that digital technology allows
Argillae is conceived as a decorative tool, a materiality full of nuances with a wide variety of earthy and neutral shades, with a myriad of formats, special pieces and decorative accessories.
Our intention: to design collections that unleash creativity!
