Andrea Mastrovito returns to exhibit in the spaces of the former Gea Grafiche Editoriali Ambrosiane, five years after his participation in the Assab One 2004 exhibition, where he presented an environmental installation in which paper silhouettes invaded the space, as if they had escaped from a giant pop-up book and were being chased by the protagonists of the Grimm brothers’ tale The Bremen Town Musicians.

With Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino (Encyclopaedia of Garden Flowers), the artist once again takes his cue from books – and therefore from the materials produced by the machinery of the former industrial plant – but turns the paper production mechanism upside down, causing thousands of flowers and garden plants to bloom from hundreds of books laid out on the ground. Enciclopedia dei fiori da giardino is in fact a large installation consisting of 500 volumes of the dictionary of the same name, published in 2008 by Mondadori. Each volume is divided into three parts, cut out and presented to the public lying on the ground, opened at the pages that the artist and a team of assistants have partially cut out and raised to achieve the visual effect of a real flowerbed of paper flowers.

The work draws inspiration from Magritte and Kosuth’s reflections on the nature of the objects that surround us and their image, on how this image is perceived by the observer and how much of the original object is actually part of its reproduction. The flowers, printed on the pages of illustrated books, bloom again from the pages, simulating the image they represent and from which they were taken: a book is made of paper, paper is made from the wood of trees. And, as Mastrovito recalls, quoting Sergio Endrigo, “to make a tree, you need a flower…”.

The project is itinerant and, after its first presentation at ASSAB ONE, it will be exhibited in several public venues in Italy and abroad.