Nicola Ghirardelli: Memories We Have Forgotten

The art of the garden, present in Western culture since antiquity, expanded within bourgeois culture through the reorganisation of nature and its inflorescences, finding great fertility in the French courts of the 14th century and later in the Italian courts of the early Renaissance. The principle of the associative system through which to reformulate the natural order is based on the search for an idea of organicity, of a floral rhythm comparable to what Burle Marx defined as an orchestration of musical notes in an open space— plants as notes, which can be altered according to the chord they produce. During modernism, the design of green areas takes on an infrastructural function: the objective is the decoration of public space, in the function of the application of a demagogic living space in which to exercise any form of soft-power, of representation of the upper-middle class. Over the centuries, this idea of decorativism, closely linked to a precise social class, has exasperated the symbolism of nature to the point of assuming not only the form of urban ornamentation, for the delimitation of central spaces from peripheral ones, but also reappearing within design, connoting the historic centres of every European city.

Nicola Ghirardelli’s Giardino in Cenere presents itself as an alternative to the failed ideology that for centuries has perpetuated the idea of being able to tame organic nature. Rather, what appears in the spaces of The Address seems to be the erosion of all that we have apparently set aside, and that until now has composed part of our collective memory: architectural friezes, symbolic structures deteriorated from their original function, floral patterns and narrative cycles. The sculptural fragments are despoiled from their original location, seeming to have been burnt by violent fires and subsequently reassembled towards the formulation of a mnemonic agglomerate. The forms that Nicola Ghirardelli amalgamates in this case, through the re-appropriation of sculptural discursive practices, aim to restore another organicity, which gives rise to a multiplicity of irregular utterances. This irregularity is given by the fact that there is no interest on the part of the artist in this case in tracing these symbolic structures back to a precise space and time. The textures in the installations have been conjured up from an open-source archive and subsequently remodelled through 3D printing.

Sicomoro (2024), is de facto one of the main installations within the exhibition. The work is composed of four terracotta trees, produced using the bucchero technique – a firing process in the absence of oxygen, which, thanks to the combustion of wood, branches and sawdust, allows ferrous oxide to develop, producing a characteristic metallic black colour on the sculptures. Each of them expresses Nicola Ghirardelli’s sculptural interest in the use of fire as a defining element, starting with the alchemical philosophy of the transformation of matter. In Ghirardelli’s sculptures, there is never any idea of linearity, neither of the history nor the production of the organic image: in fact, the work is always shared with the elements that are left to answer for their essence. The alternative then is to burn to radiate, to re-imagine, to conspire, to resist.

-Text by Arnold Braho

Nicola Ghirardelli (b.1994, Como) lives and works in Tuscany.

Selected exhibitions: 2023. Vestigia, Daniele Agostini Gallery, Lugano Fuori porta, Villa Pacchiani, Croce Sull’Arno Duale, Contemporary Cluster, Rome, Riportando tutto a casa, Museo delle Navi Romane di Nemi, Rome Fare i conti con il rurale, Fondazione L’Arsenale, Iseo. 2022. E ci fa dispetto il tempo, Arezzo Break-In. Temporal Displacement, The Address, Brescia. 2021. Instructions to light keepers, Sa.turn, Milan Les danses nocturnes, Spread Museum, Entrevaux, France ‘ARDERE, ARDERE, ARDERE, ARDERE’ Sa.turn, Verona L’Armonia, Manifattura Tabacchi, Florence