Opening: ‘Segni di segni’ by Pia Gazzola

Ivorypress Bookshop opened on 6 June the exhibition Segni di Segni, by artist Pia Gazzola.

For years Pia Gazzola has been collecting on paper the traces left by the movement of different types of plants whose leaves, with their ends of covered in ink, act as instruments of graphic expression that are able to capture configurations that react to the flexibility of the vegetable fibres in the breeze or the wind. In this way, they provide us with an inventory of the ways in which some common and familiar plants move, dance or ‘write’.

The artist has achieved a visual repertoire that relates to the vivacity inherent in the way in which trees, bushes, plants, branches and leaves blow in the wind. The distinct behaviours of these organic, natural beings are shown as enigmatic hieroglyphics drawn with their limbs and offered to us for our curiosity and delight. These singular traces and stains arise from the original characteristics of their activity. Each plant generates its own graphic territory, defined by actions and reactions, by the amplitude and the rhythm of forces that are more or less predictable or arbitrary.

These prints, on view at Ivorypress until 6 July, illustrate, in a literal way, the old metaphor of Nature as a book. Everyone knows that the authority of this book has been profoundly revered since ancient times. It is the authority that, for instance, protects and justifies the desire for immortality of lovers when they carve their names into the bark of a tree. They aspire to place themselves within its everlasting pages.