Artforum: Piero Gilardi Review

The playfulness of Piero Gilardi’s “Tappeti-Natura” (Nature-Carpets), 1965–, belies the conceptual work and technical skill that went into making them, as well as the complexity of the postwar moment in which the Italian artist’s project first emerged. In this first collective showing of the Nature-Carpets in the United States, a dreamlike setting draws viewers into a space in which they move from one disconnected environment to another, traversing sculpted and painted polyurethane streambeds, fields, and seascapes. Several large examples are laid horizontally on the floor, the illusion of their topography subtly broken by a side view of the unpainted material base. Others hang from the walls like paintings, tapestries, or dioramas in a natural-history museum. A verdant spring meadow, Terreno di montagna (Mountain Terrain), 1966, tumbles to the floor from a wall-mounted roll, like those from which these deceptively industrial-looking sculptures were once shown and sold by the yard.