Piero Gilardi - Cabbage in the Snow

The work is part of Piero Gilardi's famous "Nature Carpets" series, created starting in 1965. The artist faithfully recreates natural settings, such as riverbeds, patches of undergrowth, flowery meadows, or vegetable gardens, enclosed in panels and created using polyurethane foam. Through faithful, hyper-realistic, yet explicitly artificial reproductions, Piero Gilardi addresses his ecological concerns. Indeed, his "Nature Carpets," with their natural appearance concealing a synthetic, plastic-like substance, are an act of protest against an exploited environment that has become sterile due to human intervention.

Piero Gilardi's creation of "Nature Carpets" draws on important contemporary art movements of the 1960s and 1970s, which lend themselves perfectly to the artist's ecological message. The proposition of a concrete object taken as is, which can practically be considered a readymade given the hyperrealistic execution of the fragment of nature, harks back to the New Dada movements and the work of artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg. In the latter, in particular, the contemporary readymade is subjected to a recontextualization inspired by Pop Art, whereby the object is a banal consumer product (his hamburgers are famous), and this product is produced in a patently fake and artificial manner. Piero Gilardi does the same with nature, which itself becomes an object, or better yet, a consumer product, taking shape in the deliberately banal and fake pop hyperrealism that Oldenburg gave to his hamburgers. Gilardi achieves this effect by using expanded polyurethane which, by reproducing natural elements in a hyperrealistic way, gives them a particularly swollen and soft shape.

Born in Turin in 1942, he created his first works in polyurethane foam, "Tappeti Natura," in 1965. He has exhibited in Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and New York. In the 1960s, he participated in the formation of Arte Povera, after which he interrupted his artistic production to devote himself to a long transcultural experience in Nicaragua, on Indian reservations in the USA, and in Africa. He returned to the art world in 1981, dedicating himself to interactive and multimedia research. He currently promotes the Parco d'Arte Vivente project. He lives and works in Turin.

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