Portfolio: Gaia Bellini Her works are aesthetic and gnoseological reflections on plant life

Gaia Bellini was born in 1996 in Bardolino, where she lives and works. At a young age, she studied watercolour in a village workshop. After completing her studies, she spent a year in South America, where she had the opportunity to assist and study the matter of colour that arises from the vegetable world. Upon returning to Italy, she graduated in Visual Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice and, at the same time, deepened her study of dyeing plants and vegetable printing.

Statement

The earth is the sounding board which makes man happy. If it is abandoned, even happiness disappears, understood as eudaimonia – the natural condition of man – and with it, the connection with the spirit. This condition, dating back to the classical era, underlies the work of Gaia Bellini, who, with a slow and ancient method, imprints Nature on the canvas, giving it a form that embodies her silent battle for the rediscovery of the sacred.

Gaia Bellini lives and feels her place of origin, a total sentimental participation that she translates with Apollonian style, a rigorous procedure that leaves room for surprise. The final result, in fact, is oriented by the artist, but Nature decrees the canvas’s final aspect. The harmony created by the gradation of the plants, imprinted on the canvas after being exposed to atmospheric agents, makes Nature in all respects, the co-author of artistic and philosophical practice.

The plants are printed on natural cotton canvases, leaving a coloured shadow: an absence that becomes a present itself. Bellini’s works are aesthetic and gnoseological reflections on plant life, the only ones in total adherence to the surrounding environment and the only ones to have shaped the planet inhabited by man.

Human derives from homo, a Latin term related to humus, “earth”. The relationship between man and earth is already in its etymology and the basis of some existential questions concerning the meaning of his presence on the planet. Humus, in particular, refers to moist earth, the environment suitable for cultivation. The Latin verb to cultivate – colĕre – has different meanings: it expresses the act of working the land but of inhabiting it and, alongside the word ‘vitam’, to live. Therefore, cultivation is not understood only as agriculture but also as the culture of the soul or, again, religious worship, constituting a horizon of practical and theoretical sense. Through Bellini’s art, we have once again approached the ritual, an intimate and slow connection to the environment, which through dilated times and listening, reconnects man to the first divinities who shaped the cosmos: plants.

The aesthetic experience of Gaia Bellini’s works is profound, a vision capable of permeating the being and modifying the gaze on everyday life, from the most common to the most political gesture. In addition to the pleasure of looking at, these botanical prints lead back to an experience of truth and current events.

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