The title of the exhibition – Natura espansa – is programmatic in itself: just as there is an “augmented reality” from the new electronic media, so there is an “expanded nature” which, however, in the eyes of the artist, closely resembles a “cry” from nature, concealed under the “augmented” colours of the fruits, grass, fallen tree trunks, snow or sea waves, made of foam rubber by the Turin artist.

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The adventure of the “nature carpets” – as they were called from the beginning – began in 1964-65, and the action of cutting and selling nature “by the meter”, which Gilardi carried out in the second half of the Sixties, is symptomatic of the discourse of denunciation, resistance, and attention to “biopolitics” that characterizes all the artist's activity, up to today, with the significant and coherent decision to give up making art to dedicate himself to social issues, during the Seventies.

This exhibition presents about fifty recent works, which have nevertheless lost none of their provocative charge and their status as “mementos” to the human race: after all, the artist's almost prophetic vocation has always pervaded his works, both during the time of the so-called class struggle – the Seventies – and today, when the battlefield has become the planetary ecosystem.