Year

2025

Category

Interactive installation

Abstract

There were thousands of “dead” spaces like the lot I had observed, thousands of transitional environments that no one saw, that had been rendered invisible because they were not “of use.” Anything could inhabit them for a time without anyone noticing.

 

Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

 

 

amidst soaring green reliefs of ailanthus altissima, winding ficus carica, extensive and inaccessible agglomerations of rubus ulmifolius, periscopic alcea rosea and dappled blankets of trifolium campestre, observed from below by dark rabbit holes and from above by the susceptible circling of seagulls, cotissi, scraps and fragments of glass of various shapes emerge from the ground, demanding presence: like bulbs, tubers and rhizomes, in spite of biosystemic habits, the amorphous solid is about to bud: an alien ecosystem takes shape.

Visual artists

quatrième____paysage

Material

glass; soil; sheet of glass.

Exhibitions

2025

Presented inside the collective exhibition Fluid Matter: Humanature, held in SPARC* Spazio Arte Contmeporanea, Venezia [IT] from July 14th to August 8th 2025.

 

From July 14 to August 8, 2025 SPARC* – Spazio Arte Contemporanea is hosting the Fluid Matter project, which after a first exhibition in 2024 on the occasion of The Venice Glass Week, returns to present a new group show of artists who use glass as a common medium of expression. The curatorial team, this time composed of Dario Dalla Lana, Francesca Giubilei, Cosima Montavoci and Lorenzo Passi, decided to focus on the relationship between man and nature, between physical and digital reality, between society and the environment, identifying glass as that symbolic medium, capable of reflecting and deforming our perceptions. Humanature is the title of this new exhibition that involves thirteen artists [Alessandro Pugno, Claudia Virginia Vitari, Francesca Piovesan, Henriikka Pöllänen, Jessica Rimondi, Lætitia Jacquetton, Lothar Böttcher, Margarida Alves, Mollified, Patrick Roth, Penzo+Fiore, quatrième____paysage], all of whom share an interest in this material as a creative filter through which to explore the challenges and tensions of the contemporary human condition in the complex fabric of the reality we inhabit. The definition of nature in the Treccani Encyclopedia-“the total system of living beings, animals and plants, and inanimate things that present an order, realize types and are formed according to laws”-invites us to consider nature as a complex universe, of which man is a part but which he contemplates, studies and modifies as if he were an outsider. It is perhaps because of this basic flaw, rooted since Humanism, that man and nature are frequently considered antithetical entities and the idea of nature opposed to the concept of culture. Today, the relationship between man and nature is presented in a more complex and less Manichean way. Awareness of our interdependence is growing, but it clashes with everyday actions that continue to challenge the ecological balance. The exhibition highlights two perspectives: on the one hand, an interest on the part of some artists in the involvement of nature, its elements and processes, in the production of the work itself. On the other hand, a more critical and reflective look at human frailty and its ability to survive in a world in crisis emerges. Glass, the preferred medium for interpreting these themes, turns out to be a material of surprising possibilities: it is versatile, metamorphic, complex, and the works in the exhibition highlight some of its many potentialities both in reference to physical characteristics (hardness, fragility, different degrees of transparency and purity, the ability to maintain memory of the original fluidity even once solidified) and technological [hot or cold processing, chemical-physical or mechanical] and symbolic [the plate, the lens and the see-through, the archetype of the container, the reference to the primordial elements: water, fire…].

 

curated by:

Dario Dalla Lana; Francesca Giubilei [Venice Art Factory]; Cosima Montavoci; Lorenzo Passi.

 

images:

Enrico Fiorese