The future of landscape

The landscapes of Pietro Porcinai
There is a deep bond between the natural world and the mind expressed through the photography by Alessio Guarino. His view on his surroundings captivates the link between gardens and the landscape, underlining the distance between designs that are natural and what is artificial. Guarino employs light as his accomplice: sharp at first to define the outlines of the homes and the trees against the skies billowing with Baroque clouds; then soft in the brush-strokes of shadows against the vegetated texture of lawns, leaves, hedges… His shots do not represent the landscape, they belong to it. If there is an interpretation to be had, it is that the observers are guided to the comprehend the thought process that oriented the design choices of Porcinai. This talented photographer possesses the intrinsic instinct that evokes ancestral images, comparing the anthropized landscape of the Tuscan countryside to the controlled-designed arrangement of the gardens. And consequently, by observing the images, observers find themselves locked in the mind of the garden landscaper who has "listened" to the site and intercepted the genius loci. Like a game of Chinese boxes, they will enter the minds of generations of the Men who have molded the natural surroundings of the garden, those who have simply enjoyed the beauty or those, like Guarino, who have extracted their artistic inspiration; heavy with expressed and occult meaning, the observer will also become a part of the future of the surroundings. Fulvia Grandizio

Notes for a text on Pietro Porcinai's gardens
The twentieth century has often demonstrated that the theory of a stylistic vocabulary shouldn't be forced to confront a long-standing tradition, but should rather break the patterns and formal instances that generate a particular aesthetic code. The rigidity of methodology, often marked by an explicit contrast with standard and epistemological models tied to the past, has tried, with the experiences of the Bauhaus, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism, to free art from its dependence from obsolete, linguistically unfaithful to the original forms of expression, of an art that should solve the antithetical and ideological relationship, linking the individual to the social and cultural reality of his time.

The gardens of Florence-based landscape architect Pietro Porcinai (1910-1986) represent an interpretative grid that allows us to understand the complexity of experience and meditation on modern landscape, intended as a complete design, based on the expression of a world view where you place the human and imaginary experience of infinity. Porcinai, one of the greatest landscape architects of the twentieth century, has been able to explore with passionate skill and foresight, the design of public and private green spaces; the ethic and aesthetic enhancement of environmental heritage; and the possibility to interrogate and contextualize the hermeneutic relationship between nature and individual consciousness. The ideological contribution of Porcinai's architectural research considers the "green" an aesthetic and cultural reality, which assigns the individual the ability to evoke an edifying philosophical predisposition which updates and brings into play the Renaissance principle of the symbolic union between human activity and the interlacing of relationships that make the understanding of nature possible. Marco Mazzi