There is a lovely photograph, shot recently by Leo, Piero Gilardi’s son, portraying his father at work in the silence of his studio. I often find myself going back to look at it: I note Piero’s gesturality as he carefully puts together a Tappeto-Natura (Nature-Carpet). Just as the hand of the pianist glides over the keyboard, resting on a key so as to let the note ring out, likewise, the artist delicately places a colored piece of fruit on the base of his work… He positions it in an exact point, attaching it with great care, and in that vibrant moment, as if by magic, a landscape comes to life. I’m looking at this photograph again now. I go back to that detail of his hand, and I am reminded of an essay by Luigi Ghirri from 1989 titled “The Impossible Landscape.” In particular, I recall the passage in which Luigi reflects on the mystery of the gaze, and I feel as if his considerations are showing me the way: “Giordano Bruno said that images are ‘enigmas resolved with the heart.’ […] Perhaps this is the feeling that guides me when I look at a landscape.”
Gilardi produced his first Tappeto-Natura in 1965. Right from the start, he projected himself wholeheartedly into this work, for his dream—piece by piece—was to put together a “possible landscape,” one from which pure vital energy might spring forth. Indeed, this is a carpet that invites everyone to encounter nature. It’s something that may be placed on the floor in order to evoke the thrill of a field in blossom, or hung on a wall to recreate the brightness of a horizon. At that time, it was even something people could touch freely with their hands, tread on with their feet or even wear like a second skin. This was because Gilardi proposed an “inhabitable art,” borrowing from the title of the group exhibition Arte Abitabile in which he took part in 1966 in Turin, at the Galleria Sperone, along with Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gianni Piacentino. In general, art was designed to go beyond the mere dimension of the object, to enter into a relationship with the body, the mind, the physical environment and even people’s emotional sphere. Interaction with the work was a key condition for the work itself to express its very raison d’être. Not by chance, in this group show—which emerged from a constructive dialogue between the artists and the gallerist—Gilardi displayed a Tappeto-Natura but also set up a work titled Terrazza (Terrace): a sort of pile dwelling made out of scaffolding, or rather a lookout tower to climb up and from which to sense all the energy arising from this newly created landscape.
It may seem like something of a contradiction, but the Tappeto-Natura is a work that expresses a notion of nature thanks to the use of an artificial material. It’s a sculpture in polyurethane foam, obtained through the assembly of elements that Gilardi carves out of it. It’s a soft and spongy composition, imbibed in synthetic pigment dissolved in latex rubber, thus creating a colorful microcosm which one may willingly lose oneself in, only to then find oneself again. From my conversations with the artist, I understand that at the time, his intention was to produce genuine “aesthetic objects with practical purposes,” going beyond the dualism between art and technology, nature and artifice, or between the individual and the world. In an interview with Stefano Bucci, published in La Lettura, the Sunday supplement issued with the Corriere della Sera newspaper on May 1, 2022, Gilardi states: “In 1965, I was a young artist, twenty-three years of age, and I believed in new technologies as a means of freedom and emancipation. The concept of the ‘global village’ as introduced by Marshall McLuhan had fascinated us all, leading us to hope in a future full of opportunity. This opportunity was clearly also aimed at the visual arts: McLuhan encouraged the use of the new technologies in artistic creation, thereby underlining the work’s ‘immaterial’ value as well as its existential reach.” Considering a product of such modern conception as polyurethane foam, the message to be found in the Tappeto-Natura is therefore both contemporary and ancient at the same time… In other words, being part of a reality but reacquiring its deepest meaning in order to make it truly “our own.” This is where Gilardi’s humanist vision emerges, where his landscape comes to the fore, and every paradox is resolved.
I continue my research, going to the Giorgio Maffei Bibliographical Studio to consult Pianeta Fresco. Fernanda Pivano, Allen Ginsberg, and Ettore Sottsass Jr. founded this magazine in Milan, unleashing its brief yet intense lease of life, just like all things fueled by burning passion. It first came out in December 1967, while the second issue in 1968 was also to be its last. Page after page, the graphics and psychedelic contents form an extraordinary whole that promotes nonviolence, environmentalism and freedom, in keeping with American “beat” counterculture. I discovered that Gilardi had contributed to the first issue with two articles and a drawing. He makes an interesting comment on the theme of apparel, stating: “It seems to me it’s no longer a matter of giving an image to the garment, but of giving… a garment to individual imagination.” I look up for a moment from Pianeta Fresco and think back over Piero’s words, to when he recounts the start of his environmental commitment: “While walking along the bank of the Sangone creek, near Turin, I came across a heap of trash, abandoned on the riverbed. The sight of this thoroughly irritated me, and it was then that I decided to reconstruct a form of unspoiled nature.” This was the start of the Tappeto-Natura series,and then also of his Vestito-Natura (Nature-Dress): from the intimate need to imagine an environment with which to identify, but also from the desire to arouse a universal sentiment of “re-enchantment,” of awe in the face of nature itself. Piece after piece, this work is thus a search for the self, but also the construction of an ideal landscape. Starting from the artist’s initial visionary impetus, I can now state without a shadow of doubt that Piero Gilardi’s outlook is very much an ecology of the gaze.
In the mid-1960s, the first ecological reflections came to the fore thanks to a small minority of intellectuals and idealists who had proposed the possibility of a different world. In this sense, the Tappeto-Natura served as an incubator of thoughts and memories, a machine for generating emotions, but also a springboard toward the future. Gilardi was born in Turin on August 3, 1942, and shortly afterwards his family moved to the countryside to escape from the war. In his first three years of life, Piero grew up in a rural setting, full of imagery that would settle in his unconscious mind, only to later resurface through his work as an artist. Corn, cabbages under the snow, fallen apples, pumpkins... Gilardi’s nature is one of food, conviviality, lightness, the joy of living that overcomes the horror of bombing. In the light of later developments, it would also come to mean a newly cleared riverbed, a love of the sea, the freedom of travel, with seagulls flying above the water, or the vivid hues of an exotic beach. Italo Calvino indeed dedicated one of his famous lectures—brought together under the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium and published posthumously in 1988 by Harvard University Press—to “lightness.” On this theme, there is an illuminating passage in which Calvino says: “Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. [...] I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.”
Nineteen sixty-six to 1967 was a very special moment for Gilardi, and indeed not only for him. As Piero himself recounts, “It was a time of great ferment and transition. The new directions were those of Arte Povera and all those international currents aimed at transforming art from the production of aesthetic objects into relational acts. Art was leaving the safe haven of aesthetics and entering the real-life experience of the social arena.” Hence, no longer object but experience, no longer the representation but the presentation of reality, the Tappeto-Natura is an expression of this shift. In May 1966, Gilardi held his first solo show with his carpets in Turin at the Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery. In January 1967, he exhibited in Paris at Ileana Sonnabend’s gallery, leading to his widespread success across Europe, which would take him to the United States. His résumé features a list of major events, but what interested Gilardi most of all was revealing the alchemy underpinning his work: that between art and life. The Piper Club had just opened its doors in Turin: an underground space, a “kaleidoscopic box” where music, theater, cinema, literature, and radical architecture intertwined in a joyful union with art. Gilardi presented his carpets on January 25, 1967, and in a typed account he then relayed a number of his impressions: “So Gilberto [Zorio] and I, using copious lengths of chain, hooked up a sea, a desert, corn cobs, stones, and pumpkins on that long band of satin-finished aluminum that normally serves as a screen for slideshows.” There were many people present, and the last evening the exhibition turned into a wild happening. The following May 13, the Beat Fashion Parade was also held at the Piper, featuring garments created by Boetti, Colombotto Rosso, Anne Marie Sauzeau, and Gilardi. Various girls donned his Vestito-Natura dresses, and everyone ended up dancing the Shake.
A wonderful film, shot by Ugo Nespolo in 1968 and titled Buongiorno Michelangelo (Good Morning, Michelangelo), begins with Pistoletto shaving in one of his own Mirror Paintings. The message is clear: people are part of the work; art enters life, just as in the case of Gilardi’s Tappeto-Natura. I cite this example, for Pistoletto and Gilardi were close friends and both characterized the avant-garde scene as forerunners of that relational art, manifested not only through their own work but also through the creation of an outright artistic community. Piero often speaks to me of “concrete utopia,” and this expression evokes such an intent very well. In Turin between 1967 and 1968, Gilardi was the driving force behind the Deposito d’Arte Presente (Depot of Present Art). It was a former garage where Arte Povera artists all exhibited their work together, with a desire for total self-management, drawing on New York’s “alternative spaces” as a model. Above all, collector Marcello Levi supported this idea, and so did Gian Enzo Sperone, meaning the artists really could deploy their own authentic and vital creative processes. They would habitually meet on Saturday afternoons, debate issues, and then go on to a trattoria for dinner. The Deposito experience would quickly come to an end, but partly because new horizons had opened up alongside it. Pistoletto had paved the way to Paris. As Piero recalls, “My first meeting with Sonnabend was at Pistoletto’s house. I had given Michelangelo a Tappeto-Natura featuring a riverbed, and there it was, right in the middle of the room. So when Sonnabend came in, she sat down and said ‘Who made this thing here?’ And that’s how we got acquainted.” In the spring of 1967, Pistoletto set off for New York with Gilardi. This was the start of Piero’s great journey, discovering a world he had only dreamed of.
Under Piero’s guidance and with the help of his assistant Maria Grazia, a number of key documents have emerged from the archives, fortunately untouched by the fire that swept through his studio many years ago. “In New York, the traces of a new arts scene—symptomatically outlined by the Eccentric Abstraction exhibition and word of particular forms of activity on the West Coast—had got me interested in a new mental approach, one which seemed to solve the issues opened up within me by the Tappeto-Natura experience.” This is what Gilardi states in a typescript dated 1968. In another document entitled “The Funny Looking,” produced in New York in November the year before, he also declares something extremely topical: “Our technological society has restricted the freedom of the individual down to the mere decision whether to ‘do’ or ‘not to do.’ Each person participates in his own life with the same amount of energy that it takes the atomic warfare technician to push his buttons.” At this point, Piero lights a cigar and continues his discourse. From such writings and from his words, I understand many things... On landing in New York, he had found an artistic world very much akin to his own and that of his fellow members of the newborn Arte Povera group. He realized that internationally, there was a movement heading in a common direction. That is, the urgent regaining of a possible “energy” but also of a “time.” A primary, subtle energy, inherent to their work and one to be a part of at last. But also a non-chronological time, a psychic time: the time of emotion. These are the very reflections that Gilardi drew on at the time to theorize Microemotive Art.
His friend Paolo Icaro lived in New York, and this proved to be a good thing for Piero. He was able to immerse himself in the cultural fabric of the city and delve into the work being developed by Lucy Lippard through the Eccentric Abstraction exhibition with greater ease. He came into contact with various post-minimalist scenes; he got to know the many facets of Funk Art: he met the artists, saw the works, collected the images, noted everything down, and then along he went. He befriended Eva Hesse and Frank Lincoln Viner, whom he would often meet for dinner and a little empathetic exchange. He then quickly made his way back to Italy, only to return to New York once again soon after the summer to open his solo exhibition at the Fischback Gallery on September 12, 1967. He would soak up the atmosphere of the city for several months, as well as going to California to pick up on the differences between NY and Bay Area artists. In general, they were making incredibly fluid, soft, sculptural works, made using nontraditional materials, and the focus had shifted from the object to the process. There was indeed the scent of a new art in the air, and Gilardi was hot on its tracks. Rediscovering the potential of the individual in the context of the collective was a need felt throughout Western culture—something that artists were grasping first and that Gilardi also felt the need to affirm. His Microemotive Art thus served as a “bridge” between various experiences. Armed with his suitcase, dossier and his dreams, between 1967 and 1968, Piero moved around tirelessly between the United States, Italy, France, Holland, England, Germany, and Northern Europe. He developed a magnificent network of contacts between only apparently distant worlds, and in the meantime, he wrote up his reports in diary form for the Italian magazine Flash Art. He also published his thoughts as an artist in numerous other journals, including the American Arts Magazine, the Swedish Konstrevy, and the French Robho.
“The purpose of my trips was to stimulate and foster the emergence of a network of artists working on new trends, free and independent of the market. The photography dossier I carried with me ended up containing the work of sixty artists, and in my meetings with each of them, I was able to show just how an international movement with a profound conceptual unity was taking root.” This is what Gilardi tells me, adding that the contents of that dossier would serve as a genuine inspiration behind two momentous events in 1969, namely When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle in Bern and Op Losse Schroeven at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In essence, this too is his way of making art—neglecting some of his own expressive research in order to nurture a much broader and choral one. Returning to the Fischback Gallery, however, what Gilardi presented was an evolution of his work: the Rotolo di Tappeto-Natura (Roll of Nature-Carpet). It is basically a very long Tappeto-Natura, wrapped around a large spool, to be unfurled and shown to the public in all its expressive potency. It is art to be sold by the yard, thus an accessible and democratic form of art. It’s a kind of environmental art that invites us to relate to it, as highlighted by Piero’s own words, “I had a 160 square-foot nature fake displayed on the floor of Fischback’s Gallery. Adults walked all around it and were amused and intrigued. Then a bunch of teenagers came in and in the most casual way sat and lay down on it and continued their talking. They were absolutely right and they got the message I wanted to express.”
Gilardi returned briefly to Italy in the summer of 1967, also to take part in a major event: Lo spazio dell’immagine (The Space of the Image). Held from July to October at Palazzo Trinci in Foligno, it was an exhibition focusing on the participatory and environmental dimension of Italian art, with various artists working on the contemporary scene, including even Lucio Fontana. On his part, Gilardi came up with an installation comprising two orthogonal walls that formed four environments, in each of which he placed one of his carpets, for a total of four pieces. He arranged them somewhat rolled up or folded, thus inviting people to handle and use them. The Tappeto-Natura had become his tool for sharing a landscape that cannot exist without people. Along similar lines, that same year Piero approached the world of radical design while maintaining his identity as an artist. Ugo Nespolo put him in touch with Turin designer Giuseppe Raimondi, who in turn introduced him to the Gufram company. A fruitful exchange was established, and in 1967–68, Gilardi made the multiple titled Sassi (Rocks) with Gufram: a sculpture you can sit on, play with, or simply look at. But above all, an object that goes far beyond the idea of “function” to reaffirm its being an “experience” through its multiplication. This work would be displayed in the legendary exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at New York’s MoMA in 1972. It is no coincidence that also on this occasion, the inspiring theme was that of the landscape. And so I think back once more to Luigi Ghirri, who in his 1988 essay “There Is Nothing Old Under the Sun” thus concludes: “Landscape is not where nature ends and the artificial world begins; it is rather a passageway that cannot be delimited geographically, or better, a place of our time, our epochal cipher.”
Piero continued to travel, in search of that collective creativity. However, albeit in alternating phases, he has never stopped making his Tappeto-Natura works with which to compose this landscape. His is a vision full of lyricism and poetry, yet one which is also profoundly postmodern. He seeks himself within that landscape, in the knowledge that he has embarked on a never-ending journey. In 1966, on the occasion of his solo show at the Sperone Gallery, he wrote, “I hope, one day, to be able to reunite all of the carpets I am creating in a large, level place, enclosed by a shapeless and opalescent dome: in that rarefied environment, the image of each carpet begins to expand and distort itself, following an incomprehensible yet acceptable organic rhythm.” I ask Piero whether he is pleased this phrase is to be featured on a wall in Gallery 8 in the Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura exhibition at Magazzino Italian Art. Piero nods, smiling, and meanwhile continues to work in the silence of his studio.
Translated from Italian by Bennett Bazalgette-Staples.