Many questions are raised by Piero Gilardi’s work. What is truly nature and what is the work of art? How is the definition of nature and the natural changing, along with the overall definition of man and human, also in the light of A.I. technology? What are the differences that distinguish the vegetable, the human, the animal and the mineral?  These questions are followed by a consideration of the role of technology in our time, the anthropisation of the world and the end of anthropocentrism between the becoming-machine and the becoming-earth.

Gilardi foresaw, as early as the 1960s, how under the pressure of increasingly invasive technology, the boundaries between man and nature, between object and organic body, were gradually transforming and overlapping, opening up new forms of coexistence and subjectivity, which were sometimes paradoxical but not necessarily dystopian. 

The polyurethane fragments do not represent or suggest, but become sensory vectors, not least through the paradoxicality of their relationship with natural reality, which prompt the observer’s brain to provide new responses to new stimuli. In this way, the surprises and mysteries of nature, through the supposed artificiality of art, become probes thrown into the reactivity of the human, into their capacity to produce new horizons of sense, or non-sense, as the case may be. The gap between the familiar and the perturbing that one feels in front of the Tappeti-natura, therefore, creates the distance, the obstruction, the ‘discrepancy’, according to a term used by the artist, that allows the observer to recreate nature by breaking down the acquired codes. In this case, therefore, nature is not only frozen in the fragment of polyurethane to which that particular image refers, but is also that of the neural connections brought into play by the interaction between the artist and the viewer of the work, and the resulting ability to extend the concept of life to the artificial, beyond the barriers of the distinction between organic and inorganic.