Nature? is the sixth exhibition of a cycle intended to offer a shared reinterpretation of the archive of Paul Thorel (1956-2020), a pioneering French-Italian artist of the electronic image, pending the publication of the catalog raisonné dedicated to him. The exhibition includes works by Italian and international artists which are part of Thorel's contemporary art collection, now managed by the Foundation. For the occasion of the Napoli Gallery Weekend, the Foundation extends its exhibition program to new spaces previously only dedicated to archival and production activities, now redesigned to accommodate the challenges of an institution increasingly versatile and open to the public.

According to Richard Feynman, a physicist and Nobel Prize winner (1965) whose fame transcends the boundaries of the scientific community, the era in which we live is the era in which we are discovering the fundamental laws of nature. In art, this epistemological challenge intertwines with a conceptual vocation, and nature turns into a polysemic form, to be questioned and interpreted in relation to society. In Thorel’s photographs, it is part of his constant practice of digital re-mediatization of the landscape, just as for Ghirri it is the discreet subject of a gaze emancipated from the analogical photographic tradition – both artists driven by an abstract project of representation. Long emphasizes nature’s role as a trace and matrix in his walking journey, an allegory of life itself, while Vanden Eynde, with a scientific method, imagines himself an archaeologist of the future devoid of primordial natural references, reconstructing the trunk of a “Frankenstein” tree with finds and fragments. Giacomelli focuses on the lyrical dimension of nature, inspired by the poems of Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi, and Kersels is the ironic one, appropriating a universal image halfway between human and natural – the snowman – and transforming it into a self-portrait that distorts and deforms the reflection of the public with its mirrored body. The exhibition continues by investigating an anthropized and synthetic declination of nature. In Löhr's works, made with organic materials, nature becomes an archetype and a model of symmetry, and in Saraceno's atmospheric sculpture it is a complex spherical ecosystem, a hybrid vision where networks are suspended between nature and algorithm. Finally, a small black and white photograph by Canell intercepts, like a mirage, a plant-antenna caged in an urban landscape, an artificial object that is the expression of a society now only capable of receiving human signals.