While taking a walk along the Sangone River on the outskirts of Turin one morning in the mid-1960s, Piero Gilardi came across an island of litter bobbing along the water edge. The artist, who has died aged 80, took the memory back to his studio and began to create idealised versions of nature, patches of archetypal terrain using, with some irony, carved and painted human-made polyurethane foam.
One of his earliest Tappeto-Natura, or “Nature-Carpets”, titled Sassi (Stones, 1967), mimics a patch of the stony riverbed, the sculpture a metre or so in length and shown on the floor. Another foam carpet recreates receding snow through which crocuses bloom; yet another a tangle of sunflowers against a lush green mossy surface.
