Second Nature is an exhibition project by the artist Quayola (Rome, 1982) which aims to offer a new reading of the plant world with a contemporary vision, in a historical place such as the Botanical Garden of Padua, one of the most illustrious witnesses of the evolution of science of botany.
The project was born from a collaboration between the Alberto Peruzzo Foundation and the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, with the support of Marignana Arte gallery in Venice.
Through a practice focused on nature, and referring to the classical artistic tradition, Quayola’s works open an investigation into the digital languages of reading and encoding reality. It involves technology both formally and conceptually, and enhances the place itself, both in its symbolic function as an emblem of history and research, in its ability to interpret the transformations and urgencies of our age thanks to the progress of scientific activity. Quayola’s digital works of “Remains” and “Jardins d’Été” series which have flowers and forests as their subject, interacted, in fact, with the places of the ancient botanical garden in an exchange that was not only aesthetic: the project disclosed connections between the practice of artist, the scientific tradition of the garden and the most compelling issues relating to the evolutionary direction of the human species and the planet.
Quayola’s work, internationally recognized, stands out for its strongly contemporary sign and at the same time connected to the European artistic tradition. In fact, the artist investigates reality through the eyes of the computer, and offers us a “second nature” to observe, different from the human experience we are used to. Therefore, the knowledge of the world today is no longer only on a human scale and what Quayola proposes are images in which the subjective human vision coexists with the vision of machine. The artist uses technology to activate new mechanisms of comprehension and expression of Nature.