The artists in the exhibition share this interest, as much theoretical as practical, in observing the natural and animal environment, in studying atmospheric and biological phenomena, and in the magical aspects that accompany the metamorphoses that occur in nature. Different practices and techniques linked to different places, and therefore to singular biographical experiences, however they share a common affection: that of feeling and, in certain aspects, making the landscape. For this reason, the exhibition has been conceived as a concert of several voices, as a ‘variation on a theme’, not only by bringing the works into dialogue, but also by proposing a bibliography of reference works, discussed collectively with the artists, which will remain available to the public for the duration of the exhibition.

Thus Edoardo Manzoni’s sculptures, linked to the themes of mimesis, hunting and seduction, also with respect to animal garments and their apparent dysfunctionality, lead the artist to dialogue with Silvia Mariotti’s installation, which focuses on the study of nocturnal and twilight environments, the stratification of real and artificial elements and the symbolism of karst landscapes. These works are accompanied by the pictorial layers through which Simon Nicasz-Dean plays with time in his monotypes, superimposing different moments in the same environments. A memory in movement, a memory that conforms the space to an interiority, to an unconscious that straddles the subjective and the environmental. The subjective aspect and images of flowers from childhood play an important role in the works of Katherine Jones, conceived as greenhouses designed to protect unstable tropical plants and other migrated species, thus underlining the role of the artificial and natural environment as a transforming and selective agent. Giovanni Chiamenti, on the other hand, presents a series of ceramic works, hybrids between animal and plants that aim to reflect on the adaptations of species and their metamorphoses, together with a plexiglass sculpture made by processing data distorted by an A.I. Another metamorphosis is the one Giulia Mangoni is interested in, who reconstructs the story of Marica, a pre-Roman nymph continually subject to distortions of nature and never iconographically fixed, with the intention of rethinking a possible topicality of this figure linked as much to the natural universe as to the culture and history of the Isola del Liri.