The Palmizana Cultural Summer continues. With thanks to Dagmar Meneghello for this piece.
SummerArtPalmižanaMeneghello 2015.
PETAR HRANUELLI – GOLDEN RAIN
23.06.-31.10.2015. Peacock Terrace, Palmižana
The sculptor Peter Hranuelli has created a hovering garden: an installation which will decorate the Palmižana Arboretum for the entire summer. Exhibited from June 23rd in the open air Peacock Terrace at the Meneghello gallery.
This year, within Palmižana’s art summer 2015 concept, we explore the magical concept of Petar “Hranuelli’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Hranuelli, a sculptor from Brač, came up with his “golden rain” as an installation of hundreds of miraculous flowers/suns made of gold plated aluminum foil. The flowers are connected in a large network which, hung on pines, looks like a magnificent meadow transposed from another galaxy.
Putting chisel and hard materials on hold, marble, stone, glass, the sculptor allowed himself the freedom of creating a new material by breaking, torquing, crushing, wrapping and unraveling the aluminum foil, which takes on features of the pliant clay. These grooves and ridges change their color according to light of day and the occasional bursts of sunshine which emanates through the deep shade of pine trees, causing the net of abstract flowers/suns to shimmer in all shades of molten bronze.
During June, the Arboretum is filled with exultant multitude of innumerable shapes, forms and colors of flowers and exotic plants and imposes itself on this new form of flora. Hranuelli’s artificial garden of predominant rare medium flowers resemble a vision found in children’s drawings of the sun: circles out which radiate rays of light.
The artist’s meadow is at the same time equally integrated into the natural landscape and completely and drastically almost detached from it.
The observer is doubtlessly confused about how to accept the artist’s vision as a human contribution to the beauty of nature or as a prediction of artificiality that will remain following the destruction of nature, as the only form that we shall have. (Lat. Artificialis) art; unnatural, artificial.
The name itself —“Golden rain” — also leaves the observer with uncertainty. The rain resembles a gentle summer rain but also a dangerous torrential summer downpour that can break and sink natural resources. And the adjective “golden” reminds us of the majestic reflections of the sun but also of the continuous reach “for gold” within our consumer society, which in its upward trend poses a constant threat to Earth’s complete destruction.
This imaginary meadow full of large format flowers, larger than the ones we know to exist on our planet, do not grow upwards, but are swinging weightless in the air, leave us almost disturbed. In the words of a critic who described the floating, falling, green herbal gardens of another sculptor, Petar Dolić, this “Golden Rain” conveys the following message: “one day, on some artificially created space settlement this could be the only human memory of flora on the Earth – in these molds of plant shapes.”
In sum, Hranuelli leaves us nostalgic and yearning for a time on our planet which has perhaps passed, but also justifies our hope that nature will prevail.
Petar Hranuelli went into the beyond when searching for the meaning in this artificial garden. The beginning of the experiment was the “golden garden” atmosphere in the modern glass surrounded space in the shopping center of Zagreb’s Flower Square/Flowers on the Flower Square, the artificial composition in the artificial space. More luxurious, more blatant, this drastically entangled concept, he developed his thought developed in one of the great natural sanctuaries of plants: the Palmižana botanical garden. Fully artificial in complete nature.
In this constant rhyming of circuits and verticals, like a hundred suns of various shapes in cosmic worlds, in the cavities and fullness, the curves and planes, constantly changing shape and therefore the color cast, composed and unexpected interruptions, like an infinite transformation of nature. In these liberated variations of the installation at Palmižana we meet a new artistic expressions of the sculptor who is ready for bold experiments.
However we accept Hranuelli’s dream of summer nights through this spider web of aggressive or poisonous beautiful large flowers, they are scattered in the arboretum and will swing on the breeze this summer on the the island of Hvar.
(”Rastvorio sam se/ I potekao/Potocima/Rijekama/Morima.
Sad sam tu/Bez sebe/Gorak/ Kako svom izvoru/Da se vratim?“ M. Dizdar )
