Claudio Cravero
PIERO GILARDI

Description

This book aims to bring together and document a series of installations I have made since 2008, some of which are presented in the exhibition at PAV “Piero Gilardi Recent works 2008-2013”. The theme underlying this series of works began in 2008, when the Parco Arte Vivente opened to the public. For me, the lead-up had involved a total commitment to developing, financing and giving concrete form to something that, a short time before, had only been an ambitious plan. But it was a commitment shared with the group – I think we can say the “historic group” – of the cultural association acPav, and in particular with Gianluca Cosmacini, Orietta Brombin, Valentina Bonomonte and Enrico Bonanate. There was also another significance to the across-the-board commitment required to bring about this project: the work required a very considerable output of creative and relational energy that, in a sense, was “limited” by my age. (…) With cultural awareness, I believe this series of works does not contain any aesthetic-linguistic innovation, but is simply a reflective conceptual elaboration of Living Art, or Bioart as it is also called. I have not felt within me the energy, the “lymph” needed to make that semiotic step forward that all the artists of Bioart have made, that is to take that incandescent artistic medium that is the living organism, from the transgenic rabbit of Eduardo Kac to the decomposing mushrooms of Michel Blazy. (from preface by Piero Gilardi)