Painting gardens to explore the relationship between humans and nature.
Developed during the residency at Casa degli Artisti, Ailanthus focuses on Ailanthus altissima, the Tree of Heaven: a name that promises a tree reaching the sky, and that today denotes one of the most widespread invasive species, able to colonise residual spaces, infrastructure and disused urban areas.
Read the text by Anna Vittoria Magagna
Conversations on how we change the landscape and how the landscape changes us.
Along ring roads, in urban voids, in the cracks of walls: once you start seeing the ailanthus, you find it everywhere.
Aliene azioni is the publication born from Ailanthus, the project Francesco Ciavaglioli developed for the residency Omnirica, spazi desideranti at Casa degli Artisti in Milan (May–July 2026).
For months the artist followed Ailanthus altissima, the “tree of heaven” that arrived from China as an ornamental plant and is now among the most widespread invasive species in Europe. He looked for it where human control breaks off and turned that mapping into painting and an installation: large painted curtains that make the studio a contemporary hortus conclusus.
The book gathers the materials and encounters of this research:
A book for people working in contemporary art, landscape, gardens and urban ecology, and for anyone who has started looking differently at the plants growing at the margins.
English text translated from Italian with AI.
Francesco Ciavaglioli paints nature: plants, flowers, weeds, leaves, minute details of different species, sometimes an animal among pistils, pollen, clouds and skies, elements he repeats with a daily urgency that identifies nature as a means of salvation.
Read the text by Rossella Farinotti
KLON/spighe is a figurative painting underpinned by an abstract syntax: a single form repeated across the surface like a pattern, a painting in which the figure plays with decoration.
Read the text by Davide Ferri Read the Insideart interview, 2019
Fremo Immagine is an exhibition of landscapes, entirely situated and yet appropriable: skies dotted with flocks, fields of maize, birds in flight as omen, declined across different supports, from a canvas painted in oil to a large curtain painted in ink.
Read the text by Cecilia Canziani Read the conversation with Saverio Verini
A participatory work involving hundreds of people, inspired by Piero della Francesca’s Polittico della Misericordia and now part of the permanent collection of the theatre for which the polyptych was conceived.
Francesco Ciavaglioli (Avezzano, 1983) is a visual artist who lives and works in Milan. His research investigates the relationship between the image and its technical reproducibility, exploring the tension between natural representation and abstraction.
A graduate in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, he works across painting, photography, video and environmental installation. At the core of his recent work is an investigation of the garden and the serial landscape, understood as spaces of dialogue between humankind, nature and ancient painting.
Winner of the Nocivelli Prize (2020) and a finalist for the Talent Prize (2019), he has exhibited at institutions including the American Academy in Rome, Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria in Pesaro and Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto.
Works on paper, prints and editions are available in the online shop.
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