Piero Gilardi's Nature Carpets as Semantic Revolution

Piero Gilardi's 'tappeti-natura' (nature carpets), first created in the mid-1960s, are examined as a revolutionary artistic gesture that transcends their era. Lucio Fontana in 1965 immediately recognized them as an 'elsewhere' to his Spatial Concepts. Gilardi intended these polyurethane works not as gallery objects but as functional, playful items for daily life, aiming to break art out of conventional frameworks. The carpets emerged from a reflection on the death of nature as a metaphor for human impulses crushed by industrial rationality. Gilardi positioned himself as post-pop, distancing his work from both Arte Povera and Pop Art. Germano Celant, in his 1967 'Appunti per una guerriglia' on Flash Art, favored Gilardi's poverist objects over the nature carpets. The carpets are described as a plastic and chromatic construction that rejects mimesis in favor of mimicry, emphasizing artifice and illusion. They evoke the multimedia and anticipate Gilardi's later interactive virtual installations, culminating in the 2008 creation of the Parco Arte Vivente (PAV) in Turin. The article by Alberto Fiz argues that the carpets remain underexplored in their full implications.