ENCICLOPEDIA DEI FIORI DA GIARDINO – PAMPURZINI

Andrea Mastrovito 

I got the idea of these “gardens of books” in a two years ago evening, while I was arranging the studio. Zizi, my fraternal brother, came to ask me to make, at once, necessarily, a little work for a girl he had to seduce, a dancer. So, after an ungentle discussion, to make it fast, I decided to take one of the Degas’ books I had on my shelves. I open the book on a riproduction of two ballerinas and I cut them on three of their four sides, letting them attacked to the page by their feet. Once they were bent perpendicular to the page, seen from the side, they seem actually dancing on the book. Zizi grabbed the volum, he gave it to the dancer, and thanks to the power of Art, they are now living together in a nice house next to the Serio river. Reaching the Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino was an easy step from there: I noticed the naturalness and the immediacy of that work, but I needed something to give it strenght and verity. So I thought of flowers: strenght, because from the flower arises the fruit, from the fruit the tree, from the tree the paper and from the paper the book, that in my work was coming back as a flower, closing the circle going back to the starting point of the cycle. Verity because flowers on handbooks are usually in 1:1 scale, in their real dimensions, thus likely to see. In Casa Testori I show this flowerbed reproducing the exact shape of the trompe l’oeil painted on the ceiling above, becoming itslef a trompe l’oeil. Specular to the fresco also in the placement of the doves between flowers, the flowerbed find its raison d’être in its central heart, represented by the “pampurzini”, the cyclamens, the flowers that Giovanni Testori used to prefer, he that, after a heavy nervous breakdown, painted them in a famous ten-small-paintings cycle that he gave to his familiy, as a gratitude sign for having been next to him during that desease.