Words Glenn Adamson Archival photography Courtesy of the artist.
Published in No 14
Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura on view at Magazzino.org May 7, ’22 – Jan. 8, ’23.
Piero Gilardi for L’Uomo Vogue, 1966. Courtesy of the artist.
Nature isn’t what it used to be. What will it be tomorrow? That question feels suddenly, horribly urgent, but it’s by no means new. Some people have been wondering for a long, long time. One of those prophetic figures is Piero Gilardi, an artist based in Turin — the Detroit of Italy, headquarters of Fiat and Alfa Romeo. Eighty this year, he is the founder of Parco Arte Vivende (Living Art Park), situated on the former site of a car parts manufacturer, right next door to a waste-management site. The place is dedicated to the exploration of art, ecology, and biological sciences; environmental philosopher Serenella Iovino has called it “a garden in the ecology of the mind.”
What Gilardi is best known for, however, are his Tappeti Natura (Nature Carpets), which he began making way back in 1965. Simple enough to describe, Gilardi’s carpets are positively magical in person. Each rectangular relief depicts a piece of the natural world — stones in a field, a vegetable patch, a dry riverbed, even the surface of the sea. It’s as if he were selectively sectioning the whole world and transporting it for closer inspection. Enthusiastically received by the international art world in their moment of creation — they were, for example, included in Eccentric Abstraction, an era-defining show curated by Lucy Lippard at New York’s Fischbach Gallery in 1966 — the Tappeti Natura are now back in the limelight in a focused exhibition at Magazzino, the Hudson Valley’s world-class venue for the Italian avant-garde.
Gilardi exhibition at Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris 1967. Courtesy of the artist.
Gilardi developed his work in the hothouse climate of the Arte Povera movement, Italy’s response to Pop Art, and they speak quite clearly to the preoccupations of that moment. The carpets are, to begin with, strikingly photographic in effect. Just a little brighter than nature, they are cleanly cropped, sharp edges arbitrarily demarcating the field of view. As Elena Re, curator of the Magazzino exhibition, puts it, they are “like tiles of a unique and ideal countryside.” While today these qualities may prompt thoughts of Instagram and Google Earth, Gilardi was inspired by the mass media of his own time, particularly the idealized images published in glossy magazines.
It was also important to Gilardi that his work was made in a modern material. He and his assistants executed each of the many elements in his compositions — rocks, sticks, flowers, fruit — in carved and painted polyurethane foam, insubstantial as air. Like other key works of the era, among them Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror-paintings and Gaetano Pesce’s inflatable furniture, the carpets reflect a widespread preoccupation with the simulated and synthetic. (It was in 1967, of course, that Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate was offered just one word of advice: plastics.) In Gilardi’s case, though, artificiality is deployed to depict its opposite. The effect is to summon an organic utopia, while simultaneously setting it apart. It’s right there, underfoot, but unreachable. It was particularly ingenious to do this in the form of a carpet. To actually put a Gilardi in your home would be to enact a quiet tragedy — somewhat like a screen saver, panning lugubriously across a tropical island, and casting a pall on an office worker’s face.
Piero Gilardi at Galleria Sperone, Milan 1967. Courtesy of the artist.
Though they were made before the advent of the organized environmental movement — the first Earth Day was in 1970 — Gilardi’s Tappeti Natura were immediately understood as communicating this sense of loss. The designer Ettore Sottsass, writing in the magazine Domus, ascribed to them “an awareness of the invasion of deadly phenomena surrounding us.” This awareness was, perhaps, more psychological than political. In a 1968 interview, Gilardi spoke of conjuring pleasant childhood memories in his work, but also of a sense of “nature in decline.” His streambeds, he pointed out, seem to have run dry. Watermelons lie unattended in their field. Fruit has fallen to earth and started to rot. If the carpets are little bits of Eden, they are definitely situated sometime after the Fall.
There’s more here than a curse of knowledge, though. For all the prescience of Gilardi’s environmental pessimism, he also saw himself as offering a kind of hope. As he was working on the carpets, he was also developing his theory of “Microemotive Art,” which he defined as “a free, asymmetric vibration, which arises as the representative of primary energy.” The idea was that, if art could provide sufficiently intense and intimate encounters, it might give birth to a wholly new form of subjectivity. As Elena Re puts it, this would be “a moment of passage, a real bridge between worlds only seemingly far away from one another.” It’s another very Sixties idea: to solve the crises that swirl all around us, we must look within. Buried somewhere in Gilardi’s depopulated Tappeti Natura, amongst the stones and vegetables, is an ongoing faith in humankind to look after ourselves. After all, there’s no one else to do it for us.
Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura on view at Magazzino.org May 7, ’22 – Jan. 8, ’23.
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian who works at the intersection of craft, design and contemporary art. He is the former Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. Adamson’s recent publications Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects , 2018 and Craft: An American History, 2021 are published by Bloomsbury.