Hosted simultaneously in the two Rome and Milan locations of Galleria Russo, the exhibition solo exhibition Piero Gilardi. Encounters, curated by Elena Del Drago, consists of about fifty “Tappeti Natura”, the artist’s famous works. If the Milan section, with the title Exploring the beach, proposes works related to the beach, evoked through stones, plants, sand, capers, in the space Rome, the exhibition, titled News from the Earth, proposes works mainly related to the passing of the seasons: the forest, the vineyard, but also the triumph of flowering. Common ground is therefore nature and Piero Gilardi’s commitment to the preservation of the ecosystem. Born in the mid 1960s as playful floor sculptures, Gilardi’s Nature Carpets marked the transition from Pop Art to Arte Povera. Faithfully reconstructing with synthetic materials fragments of natural environments, the artist brings into focus a paradoxical situation, where the depiction of the datum of nature passes through the artificiality of materials and advances a reflection, but also a denunciation, on what is one of the now rampant features of the contemporary world: the predominance of the artificial/virtual over the real and the little care in protecting and safeguarding of the environment for the common heritage that is nature. The title Incontri is intended to emphasize the constant of Gilardi’s artistic research constituted by the effort to communicate with the Other, however however distant and apparently different it may be.
