Back in 1967, Arte Povera artists in Italy, the radicals of their time, hung out at the Piper Club, a discotheque of, by and for the avant-garde in Turin. During one nocturnal happening, young women danced in tunics made of polyurethane birch logs and ponchos studded with foam rocks to look like riverbeds. Like nature sprites, the dancers gamboled over “nature carpets,” rugs crafted of foam by Turinese artist Piero Gilardi. Guests sipped their Camparis reclining on simulated cabbage patches.
In the radical cheek of a disco decked out as a forest glade, Gilardi delivered a serious message, embodying the ecological lesson of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” written a few years before: Chemicals were poisoning the earth. Nature starts in the home. Live with it, respect it, protect it.
Now, about 55 years later, in the show “Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura” at the Magazzino Italian Art museum in Cold Spring, New York, two long-legged mannequins dressed in the same tunics surveil more than a half-century of Gilardi’s nature carpets, as if looking at a farmers market of produce during a summer of watermelon.
Magazzino carries over the same environmental message to another institution just down the road in Garrison, Manitoga/The Russel Wright Design Center, an architectural version of Gilardi’s nature carpets. Magazzino introduced the Milanese design firm Formafantasma to what is basically a modernist treehouse, where its two principals, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin, refreshed the timber structure with a subtle placement of its own organic product designs throughout the organic building.
In hindsight, given today’s environmental crisis, Gilardi’s nature carpets and Russel Wright’s timber structure, both dating from the 1960s, stand as historically prescient examples of art with an environmental message — although Gilardi and Wright sounded the same alarm through differing artistic expression: iconoclastic, contemporary sass versus Walden Pond.
At Magazzino, Gilardi carved a rough-hewed Technicolor landscape of fruits and vegetables from the most synthetic industrial materials, polyurethane painted with synthetic pigment. On thick contoured foam beds, he glued sea urchins, pumpkins, corn cobs, grapes, even the occasional armadillo passing through. The “furniture” allowed families to live with the idea of the outdoors in their living rooms, reconnecting life in the city to an increasingly fragile and defensive nature. He was introducing nature into the overindustrialized world that was killing it.
Gilardi, now 79 and living in Turin, was intellectually peripatetic, dropping in and out of the art world, pursuing ideas from ecology to digital technology to community-based art. But over a 60-year career, the backbone of his production remained nature carpets, a genre to which he returned in almost every decade, always with an ecological message delivered with puckish delight: vividly colored, slightly cartoonish, sometimes over-the-top pieces that eschewed the controlling hand of a master. He was a Geppetto, an anti-Michelangelo carving a cheap material incapable of the refinement of a masterwork. He seemed to mock the object as he made it.
In 1966, Gilardi already dreamed of reuniting all the carpets in a single space, an idea that curator Elena Re honored at Magazzino. The nature carpets form a small field, each tile in this artificial but cornucopian paradise charming in its own microcosmic way, some alive with fluorescent greens, some topped with sea gulls planing over patches of ocean. One carpet is attached to the wall on a spindle, as if to say that the carpets are not precious, but sold off the rack by the yard.–NYT
