Neve Mai Thai Rivoli 2022

Mai Thai restaurant, Rivoli, Turin, Piedmont, Italy

A full interior wall treatment commissioned for the Rivoli branch of Mai Thai, a Thai restaurant chain in Turin. The intervention covers the entire back wall of the dining room — a unified composition combining three distinct visual registers.

The dominant figure is a large-scale reclining golden Buddha — the Mahaparinirvana pose of Thai Buddhist iconography, the Buddha lying on his right side, eyes closed, robes cascading in fabric that falls and pools like liquid metal. The figure is rendered in warm gold and ochre tones, with detailed beaded ornamentation on the headdress and the texture of draped silk worked across the body. The Buddha's reclining form extends across the full width of the wall, its horizontal register giving the interior its fundamental axis. A door in the wall is incorporated into the composition, integrated rather than interrupted. Behind and alongside the golden figure, the wall carries an extensive Thai decorative pattern — "Lai Thai," the traditional ornamental vocabulary of Thai visual culture — rendered in silver-white tones against a dark grey-black ground. Stylized lotus-flame shapes contain figures of celestial beings (Devas), repeating across the upper portion of the wall; at the upper register, stencil-pattern dark motifs further layer the surface. The contrast between the warm luminous gold of the Buddha and the cool silver of the pattern produces a palette of controlled opulence. In a separate section of the wall, a Yantra diagram (ยันต์, Yant) rendered in warm gold — a sacred geometric figure of Thai Buddhist/animist tradition, here presented as a triangular temple-spire form filled with rows of Pali/Khmer script sacred syllables. The Yant is both a spiritual protective diagram and a formal object of great visual precision: its strict geometric order against the surrounding decorative material creates a moment of concentrated stillness.