And Garden Created Man.
Exhibition by di Roberto Coda Zabetta
The artist Roberto Coda Zabetta (Biella, 1975) presents the works “Frana e Fango” (“landslide and mud”) at Casa Zegna, creating a sort of wild garden: in Coda Zabetta’s work, nature is evoked through the use of an explosive chromatic charge and dense material that accumulates on the canvas.
The exhibition’s title is taken from E il giardino creò l’uomo (1912) by Jorn de Précy, a philosopher and passionate gardener who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries. In his short book, de Précy holds that to be gardeners and create real gardens we must listen to nature and the genius loci. We must never obstruct the forces at work in nature but work with them. De Précy shows how humankind has over the millennia modelled nature to create their habitat, building, rebuilding and manipulating the Earth and forgetting its delicate balances and needs.
Like de Précy, the entrepreneur Ermenegildo Zegna foresaw these crises at the beginning of the 20th century, and Oasi Zegna, now more precious than ever, bears eloquent witness.
The exhibition is part of a project that Fondazione Zegna is dedicating to relations between nature, art and science, which was launched in 2020 along with the Zegna Forest reforestation plan, and the monitoring of Oasi Zegna’s state of health.
