The Garden in Movement at Villa Burba
Salvatica, Villa Burba Cornaggia Medici, Rho (MI), 2026
English translation generated with AI from the original Italian text.
Among his many notes on botany, Leonardo da Vinci writes that “the painter fights and competes with nature”. Rendering the natural world through art, or through its formal reproduction, is an act that has accompanied humankind since its first attempts at artistic representation. After all, artists have always voiced necessary, and often redemptive, points of view. Francesco Ciavaglioli paints nature. Plants, flowers, weeds, leaves, minute details of different species, sometimes an animal mixed in among pistils, pollen, clouds and skies. He represents these elements repetitively, declaring a daily urgency that identifies the rendering of nature as a means of salvation.
The precious setting of Villa Burba in Rho becomes the container for a carefully studied and delicate installation, in which the artist places a selection of works in dialogue with the indoor and outdoor spaces of the municipally owned residence. The setting becomes an environment where the public can observe how the past converses with the present and how nature is able to create a common thread that holds everything together. Here Francesco’s work is shown for the first time from several angles, including its most intimate ones, where painting and nature proceed in continuity.
Salvatica. A threshold to be crossed.
A wooden fence enclosing a portion of nature can indicate a limit, a threshold not to be crossed. In Francesco Ciavaglioli’s solo exhibition the opposite happens: the painted limit must be crossed. These man-made elements, among the very few that Ciavaglioli depicts, are gates protecting the artist’s main subject: nature. A nature that must be safeguarded and that, in the paintings of various sizes and supports that make up the exhibition, is repeated punctually, almost obsessively. Francesco immerses the public in a delicate path where the rooms of the historic Villa converse with painting and, necessarily, with the nature that emerges from his different imaginaries. Plants, leaves, flowers, tufts of grass, portions of sky and animals are represented in various forms and patterns. At times their colours are bright and striking – oranges, blues, purples – at others darker and subtler. The artist paints them over and over, vertically, horizontally, in spirals. “Di qua, di là” (“This way, that way”), as the title of one of the works on show puts it. Different species of flowers and plants – anthurium, wild violets, agapanthus, iris, lilac, periwinkle and petunia, Greek valerian repeated endlessly, tulip, narcissus, four-leaf clover, Persian speedwell – or elements such as pollen accompany the visit with their vivid, dense layers of paint. It is a “garden in movement”, Gilles Clément would say, one of the theorists Francesco Ciavaglioli has long been reading and giving form to.
The exhibition path. A personal diary.
The artist has selected some of the rooms and halls of the Villa to show a substantial part of his production, offering viewers not only perspectives on the “redemptive” nature he represents, but also a precious portion of works and drawings taken directly from his studio. Villa Burba becomes an incubator of regenerative material that also converses with its park. It holds a personal diary of traces that, for the first time, are exhibited in new ways, revealing themselves to the public. It is a tribute to painting, to the experiments kept in an artist’s studio, to observations on nature and, of course, to the Villa that hosts these reflections. Salvatica is a careful path, punctuated with balance and clarity, that helps us take stock through a nature that lives alongside humankind, but also without it.
The repetition of forms.
Like the American minimalists, Ciavaglioli is almost obsessive in showing his choices. Instead of industrial materials, however, Francesco uses painting and vivid colours drawn from the many aesthetic possibilities of a blade of grass, a bloom, a pistil, a sky. This repetition becomes the painter’s working method, recognisable by its layered energy, in which several levels – from the first, more graphic, sharp and dense, to the later ones where shadows, lights and the movements of the subjects are added fragment by fragment – intersect, conveying the urge to escape the confines of the canvas. Some works temper the impact of colour and stylised forms more delicately: Polline, the Stagni series, Erbe (2021), for example, or the refined Giardino Velato (2021), a small painting in greys and whites in which Ciavaglioli subtly paints small flowers – perhaps tiny roses – with leaves drawn in spirals. This work has been placed in dialogue with an element of Villa Burba, as a trace to be discovered at the start of the exhibition and as a signal for visitors, who are invited to absorb every installed detail as part of a whole. Some of the Villa’s ornaments, furnishings, architectural and decorative elements feature natural subjects. Sometimes they evoke the exotic, at other times the darker nature typical of the Po Valley: a Leonardesque nature, made of branches that intertwine and survive within one another, of fog and shadowy tones. Herbs and flowers, “dear travelling companions” as Stefano Mancuso would write, accompany the visit.
The only tools required of the visitor are the gaze and a little introspection.