Piero GILARDI

Born in Turin in 1942, Piero Gilardi was a decisive contributor to the emergence of a movement that was to revolutionize European art in the mid-1960s: Arte Povera. A brilliant inventor of the "Nature Carpets" that helped spread his work, Piero Gilardi was committed from the very start of this movement to theorizing and orienting thinking around a "habitable" and "micro-emotive" art, as he himself claims in terms of the permanent interaction between the individual and his environment. This specific research is carried out within the movement, which advocates an unwavering commitment to bringing art and life closer together. Over the years, this profoundly humanist vision has been expressed in a variety of plastic, theoretical and activist forms. His plastic work proceeds almost exclusively through the inclusion in domestic spaces of fragments of nature and everyday objects reproduced in painted polyurethane foam, inviting the viewer to experience and take concrete possession of the works. But far from re-enacting a simple mimetic action, Piero Gilardi subjects the passage from source object to produced object to aesthetic interpretation and physical interaction. In this sense, Gilardi's works often, if not always, cross paths with design issues.