A.A. DANTO
2024

Invited by Teruhiro Yanagihara, artistic director of A.a. Danto, India Mahdavi used the company’s traditional know-hows as a starting point to conceive this collection, entirely manufactured in Danto’s original factory on Awajishima, an island in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. With its experimental vision, technological skills and mass production expertise, Danto aims to shift ideas behind the meaning of tiles and imagine a new interior paradigm, opening up in its wake, many possibilities.

One possibility is the ability to apply up to three layers of glazing on one single surface, which allows for various effects — some mimicking the transient and imperfect biological patterns of nature — thus acting as a ladder between the industrial and the traditional wabi-sabi aesthetic.

From this experiment, spawned the Mycelium, Freckles and Cracks patterns — each resembling the biological form they are named after using different reactions produced by the firing process.
The Criss Cross pattern reconnects with Danto’s tradition of producing ornamental tiles and lead India Mahdavi to explore relief with moulded clay — a gesture materialized as monochromatic grids, on a multitude of scales.

Mycelium emerged from a traditional japanese technique in which the crystal-shaped glaze appears during firing – through a chemical reaction that creates hypnotic landscapes, always renewed and where the expansion of crystals resembles the growth of mycelium.

Freckles appeared when coming across a stack of tiles that looked like rocks at the factory. This randomly occurs as the tiles are repeatedly brought to the production line; which make for mass produced yet unique pieces. The vibrant colours mix with a traditional technique, inducing this distorted wabi-sabi texture – a shifted representation of nature; a supernatural landscape seen through an acid filter.

Criss Cross reconnects with A.a. Danto’s tradition of making ornamental tiles, and therefore pursuing the Minpei-yaki heritage – also called Awaji ware, after the name of the island from which it originates. this technique, which implies moulding the clay, allows to play with relief on the tiles, creating different scales of monochromatic grids which – once assembled – produce this vibration.
We played with the grid on two different scales as the grout’s grid is inherent to the tile-making process.

Cracks was about experimenting a cracked finish to the tinted clay tiles – the color is not applied as a glaze but lies within the clay; the glazing is a cracked, transparent shine that brings poetry into the tiles – and color becomes a substance.