Francesco Bartoli - Il Battito Evocato

Francesco Bartoli’s first exhibition in Rome, following a long international artistic career, is a broad and profound exploration that combines art and nature, inspired by a gigantic trunk of an oriental plane tree kept in the Trastevere Botanical Garden and felled by a storm in 2011.

The exhibition is a site-specific installation consisting of delicate, abstract pieces made of paper, peat and charcoal that express the artist's deep connection with the plane tree. Using frottage, sculpture, painting, sound and video performance, Bartoli reflects on the life cycle and the long, silent and constant process of transformation of the centuries-old tree, modified over time by parasitic insects and bad weather.

The exhibition opens with a photograph that encapsulates all the elements around which Bartoli’s artistic research has revolved: body, nature, earth, imagination, darkness, light and transformation. The exhibition continues with actual “natural archaeologies”, residues of bark arranged to create a human figure with a heart of peat, a deliberate homage to Alighiero Boetti. The large frottages on the walls depict the outer skin of the tree, its voids and its solids, and delicately interact with the sculptural frottages of the tree's internal morphologies, placed horizontally on the ground. Three cloud-like plane trees “drawn” by the artist when he was a child, with an eraser, close the exhibition, as if to symbolise the ephemeral and transitory nature of all things.

The artist’s relationship with the plane tree led to the creation of a video performance, in which sound also plays a fundamental role, guiding the viewer through the exhibition.