#sottobosco

Source: DailyArt

Thistles and Butterflies

Rachel Ruysch, Self-Portrait, 1692. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750)

Rachel Ruysch was one of the most successful Dutch still life painters of the 17th and 18th centuries. Ruysch was born in The Hague, but grew up in Amsterdam. She was the oldest daughter of Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), a famous professor of anatomy and botany. She learned to paint from Willem van Aelst (1627-1683). At that time, he was the best still life painter in Amsterdam. During her own time, she her paintings were higher valued than those by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669). Her refined paintings with colourful, lifelike flowers were among the best of their kind at the time. Ruysch was a court painter for a German prince and the first woman to be a member of the artists’ society Pictura in The Hague. She was famous both at home and abroad.

Frederik Ruysch, Illustration from Opera Omnia Anatomico-Medico-Chirurgica, ca. 1737.

Ruysch grew up in a family where she had more opportunities than most other women at that time. Her father Frederik Ruysch had developed a new way of preserving body parts. This meant that the human body could be studied more closely than ever. Frederik had a large collection of curiosities, including stuffed animals, dried plants and preserved body parts. He also made fantasy landscapes using preserved human organs and babies’ skeletons. His collection was popular with tourists and many important guests came to see it. Rachel also drew and painted her father’s collection. Her drawings were so good that at the age of fifteen she was given permission to train as an artist.

Rachel Ruysch, Tree Trunk surrounded by Flowers, Butterflies and Animals, 1685. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

Ruysch worked with great care and tried to paint everything as naturally as possible. Guided by her teacher Van Aelst, she started painting ‘forest floors’, or sottobosco—pictures of snakes, snails, toads and insects among plants and bushes. She painted insects, blades of grass and small flowers using a very fine brush. Ruysch also used real moss, dipped in paint, to give the texture of the forest floor.

Rachel Ruysch, Still Life with Flowers, 1709. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Ruysch’s paintings show flowers, plants and animals that would never be seen together in the real world. That is because she used living and preserved models. In her flower paintings she combined flowers that came out in different seasons. She found rare plants from faraway countries at the Hortus Botanicus botanical gardens, where her father taught botany. Her father’s collection also included rare plants. He had a way of preserving them that made them look like they were flowering forever.

Rachel Ruysch, Observations of a Surinam Toad, 17th century. Courtesy of the Royal Society.

Surinam, a former Dutch colony, is home to the Pipa pipa or Surinam toad, an animal that was a source of considerable fascination for European scientists because of its reproductive behaviour. During an underwater courtship, eggs are ejected by the female and fertilized by the male. The male then tramples the eggs into honeycomb-like depressions in the female's back, where a skin membrane grows over them. After 12 to 20 weeks, the young toads emerge from their mother's back. Ruysch was one of the few artists who drew the toad, present in her father’s collection, and dedicated an antire painting to the animal.

Rachel Ruysch, Nature Piece with Surinam Toad (Pipa pipa), 1690. Musée du Grand Siècle, Saint-Cloud, Département des Hauts-de-Seine.

Ieri siamo entrati nella residenza artistica di Chiara Bersani al lavoro sul nuovo progetto di ricerca Sottobosco: la creazione rientra nell’ambito del progetto europeo Stronger Peripheries.

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Come ci si sente a osservare un paesaggio che il nostro corpo non potrà mai attraversare? Alla fine del 2020 Chiara è in residenza all’Arboreto. Da una delle vetrate che fanno da fondale allo spazio scenico, osserva lo spazio esterno: c’è il bosco. Guardare fuori e vedere un corpo negato. L’impossibilità di vivere col corpo quel luogo, di attraversarlo: da qui prende avvio la genesi di Sottobosco.

Sottobosco è un ambiente che deraglia dall’antropocentrinco, in metamorfosi costante e continua. Due corpi dai contorni sfumati si muovono stesi a terra. Si sfiorano e dialogano muti, si ascoltano mentre una tempesta di suoni, rumori e luci li invade. Come esseri del sottosuolo, perlustrano vie galattiche, nuotando in un mare di marshmellow. Li accompagnano movimenti quasi impercettibili, tensioni e rilassamenti che sembrano significare una trasformazione interna lenta ma inesorabile, un movimento alla scoperta di nuove forme e percezioni.

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Yesterday we entered the artistic residency of Chiara Bersani at work on her new research project Sottobosco: the creation is part of the European project Stronger Peripheries.

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How does it feel to observe a landscape that our body can never cross? At the end of 2020, Chiara is in residence at the L’arboreto Teatro Dimora. From one of the windows that form the backdrop to the stage space, she observes the space outside: there is the forest. She looks out and sees a body denied. The impossibility of experiencing that place with the body, of crossing it: this is where the genesis of Sottobosco begins.

Sottobosco is an environment that derails from the anthropocentric, in constant and continuous metamorphosis. Two bodies with blurred contours move, lying on the ground. They brush against each other and converse mute, they listen to each other while a storm of sounds, noises and lights invades them. Like beings from underground, they patrol galactic paths, swimming in a sea of marshmallows. They are accompanied by almost imperceptible movements, tensions and relaxations that seem to signify a slow but inexorable internal transformation, a movement towards the discovery of new forms and perceptions.

“A weed is but an unloved flower.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Mora di rovo (Rubus fruticosus)

Fusto con grosse spine, sospeso ad arco, ascendente o prostrato. Foglie alterne, 3-5-(7) volte palmate, sotto giabre, sopra con peluria bianca.

Grappplo più raramente pannocchia eretta. Drupa composta rossa o nera, commestibili.

HD: Boschi, margini di boschi e di sentieri, siepi, campi, giardini, radure, lande. Molto frequente. Generalmente su terreni non troppo asciutti, poveri di calcare, ma ricchi di sostanze nutritivi.

Portrait with Snakes, 2019, pastel on panel, 59 × 50 × 1 inches

Issue #152: Nicolas Party

In Sottobosco at Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles, 2020. Photo by Joshua White. Images courtesy of the artist.

Nicolas Party, Portrait with Flowers, 2018, pastel on canvas, 59 × 47.25 inches. Photo by Isabelle Arthuis.

Portrait with Langoustine, 2019, soft pastel on linen, 67 × 35.5 × 1 inches. Photo by Adam Reich.