The Garden of Waterfalls, Opus I, Summer, a triptych folding screen
consisting in acrylic painting on three plexiglass panels, belongs to a series
of ephemeral installations in nature gathered in a book of photographs, Of
water & Men, poetically inviting the viewer to a meditation on the
relationship between humans and their natural environment, particularly water.
Alongside the Garden of Waterfall Opuses,
declined in various seasons and colors (white in winter, blue and green in
spring, and in the work presented here, blue, for summer), the book includes
two other installations, Lilyfluids - thousands of Petri dishes (used by
biologists) floating on a pond like Claude Monet's Waterlilies and
immersing us in the laws of chance, in the mystery of origin, of life, of
evolution, of biodiversity, while questioning us about the demographic,
ecological, and ethical issues related to our (natural or shaped) adaptation,
as well as the consequences of the latter on the preservation of resources-, as
well as Sea Remains - painting projections on plastic protective tarpaulins
laid out between sand, ocean, like deposits of foam, nets, marine debris of
human or manufactured waste of all kinds washed ashore…
Garden of Waterfalls are displayed as windows opening
onto nature, a reference to the definition of painting as a “window
open onto the world” by Renaissance Florentine theorist Leo Battista
Alberti : “I will therefore speak, omitting all other things, about what I
do when I paint. I first draw on the surface to be painted a quadrilateral of
the size I want, made of right angles, which for me is an open window through
which one can look at history, and there I determine the size I want to give to
the figures in my painting.” De Pictura, 1435 (chapter 19).
Thus does the artist, since the Renaissance...
what would be the meaning nowadays of such a perspective and theory ?
With its flows of
painting on plexiglass panels, and thanks to the dual function of the folding
screen, both hiding and revealing, the Garden of Waterfalls installation
here camouflages the scenery in the same seasonal symbolic color as the
surrounding landscape, in the same way we avoid to really see and face the real
world, whilst there, on the contrary, embraces nature through the transparent
oculi left unpainted, thus showing our
ambivalent relationship with nature and suggesting a renewed perspective on
Alberti's historia, a perspective that is more respectful of our
environment. Nature is a Garden, a Paradise ; are we turning it forever
into a Lost Paradise?
Garden of Waterfalls is a
water-window open onto the world, a gaze upon nature that we urgently need to
change in order to finally strive towards a more responsible attitude that
respects harmony with nature and its inexhaustible source of beauty and
inspiration.
