Artist: Gianmarco Biele

Alfonso Artiaco presents storie del giardino, Gianmarco Biele’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, curated by Mario Francesco Simeone.

Bringing together nine new paintings and a sculptural intervention, the exhibition is the outcome of an extensive body of research centered on the garden. Long at the core of Biele’s practice, the garden emerges as a subject of profound symbolic complexity – an ancestral topos through which to reflect on the relationship between human beings and an ever-changing universe, between what belongs entirely to nature and what is shaped by cultural construction.

Engaging with an imagery that spans the history of representation, the works originate from the close observation of details drawn from major paintings in art history. Rather than direct quotations, they evoke iconographic echoes that resurface in new forms. Biele focuses on the vegetal elements inhabiting the margins of historical paintings – details often relegated to the edges of the composition, seemingly secondary to the central subject, yet essential in shaping space, atmosphere, and visual balance. Through a process of enlargement and the removal of their original context, these fragments acquire a new autonomy, redefining the hierarchy of vision. What once functioned as a boundary is brought to the center of the image, revealing how even what has traditionally been considered peripheral can become a bearer of meaning.

This shift in perspective unfolds as a quiet tension running through every living form. The apparent stillness of plants conceals a latent capacity for transformation, an equilibrium sustained through constant adaptation. As Maurice Maeterlinck writes in The Intelligence of Flowers: “The vegetable world, which seems to us so peaceful, so resigned, where all appears to be acceptance, silence, obedience, meditation, is, on the contrary, the place where the revolt against destiny is the fiercest and the most obstinate.” For Giorgio Agamben, the garden becomes a theological-political paradigm in which forms of coexistence and order extend beyond the botanical realm. Biele’s works allude precisely to this latent energy, restoring the vitality of the vegetal landscape.

The garden thus emerges as a site of continuous negotiation between nature and artifice, spontaneous growth and control, freedom and constraint. It is a space where every element results from the intertwining of natural processes and human intervention, where growth is guided, contained, or allowed to unfold according to ever-shifting balances. Through a painting practice attentive to detail and compositional rhythm – suspended between recognizability and abstraction while deeply rooted in the materiality of paint – the works create an immersive environment that encourages a slower, more contemplative gaze, suggesting new ways of relating to the world around us.