Antonio Bardino
The Breath of Plants

Casa Cavazzini and Liceo Classico Jacopo Stellini, Udine (I)
December 2024 ― March 2025

The Breath of Plants
Daniele Capra




The solo exhibition by Antonio Bardino The Breath of Plants features around fifteen canvas works created by the artist in recent years and new site specific works. The theme revolves around the presence of vegetation in heavily humanised contexts such as homes, balconies, and gardens. The title of the exhibition alludes to the environmental role of plants and trees, essential in oxygen production, imagined by the artist as close companions whose rhythmic flow of breath we perceive. The exhibition explores the vitality of nature and its exuberant manifestations in houseplants and garden flora — enchanting and proud entities seemingly indifferent to human presence.


The Breath of Plants — hosted at Casa Cavazzini and Liceo Classico Stellini — is accompanied by a collaborative program with high-school students. This includes the placement and care of houseplants in the museum and guided tours conducted by the students themselves. The project is a natural extension of La natura entra a scuola (“Nature Comes to School”), a significant initiative in the Italian educational program. Over recent months, students, teachers, and staff at Stellini have adopted houseplants for classrooms and common areas as a practice of individual well-being and environmental and community awareness.


The plants painted by Bardino are lush snippets of nature housed within the captivity of domestic walls, embodying the rebellious protagonists of a third landscape that pay little heed to human presence. In his paintings, domestic interiors, architecture, and furnishings fade into understated ordinariness, mere residual traces of human warmth dissipating in silence. This absence is countered by plants with their unpredictable and luxuriant anarchy — vital forms of resistance opposing humanity’s relentless drive to dominate, colonise, and bend spaces to its needs.


Bardino’s paintings are marked by strong figuration and a photographic approach to composition. His recurring subjects — trees, houseplants, hedges — are freely placed on the canvas in an anti-perspective manner, according density and visual saturation. Oil colours are applied in layers with classical technique, though occasional material or gestural episodes enliven the canvas. His palette is dominated by cool tones of green and blue, often juxtaposed with deep blacks and vibrant yellows.


The works


The agave is a recurring subject in Bardino’s latest work. Resistenza (“Resistance”) is a large-scale piece depicting an oversized detail of the plant. The artist places the nucleus from which the flowing leaves radiate at the centre of the canvas, although their entirety is not visible. The folded element in the upper right corner provides a sense of the plant’s scale and the sinuous shape of its leaves. The colours are vivid and saturated, with drips here and there that give the painted material a liquid, living quality.


In Verso casa (“Towards Home”), a group of agaves populates a garden where other plants are merely sketched. Some leaves appear to be moving, swayed by a wind rendered with transparent or gestural brushstrokes. The painting, with its vaguely metaphysical tone, conveys the sensation of a cinematic nocturne, framing the agaves as if artificially lit, like lead actors in front of a camera.


Preso nella notte (“Caught in the Night”) is a nocturnal scene featuring a large number and variety of plants arranged freely and rhythmically on the canvas. The painting evokes a magical silence, almost an invitation to hold one’s breath to avoid disturbing the plants’ rest. The large ficus leaf on the left acts as a repoussoir — a contrast element typical in landscape painting — guiding the viewer’s perception of depth. This is further enhanced by the out-of-focus blurring in the background.


The works Sola (“Alone”) and Senza un apparente motivo (“Without Apparent Reason”), created specifically for the exhibition, draw inspiration from Bardino’s visit to Liceo Classico Stellini. Here, as part of the La natura entra a scuola project, green plants are hosted in classrooms and common areas, cared for by students, teachers, and staff. In both paintings, the plants are the undisputed protagonists, placed in barely suggested settings painted with a liquid technique that leaves parts of the canvas uncovered. This approach encourages viewers to focus on the tactile and chromatic intensity of the leaves.


Sorpresa (“Surprise”) is a close-up portrait of an agave, emphasizing its ability to captivate the viewer’s gaze and its unexpectedly overflowing sensuality. The leaves, sometimes fully painted and other times left incomplete and dripping, guide the eye toward the plant’s base, where they radiate outward. The visual centre, where all lines of force converge, coincides with the plant’s generative core.


The paintings Biblioteca (“Library”) and Aula II E (“Classroom II E”) were created specifically for the kitchen of Appartamento Cavazzini, to be displayed near the sink. These works connect the intimate kitchen space with two specific locations at Liceo Stellini, from which the represented plants originate. Simultaneously, for visitors entering the home of Dante Cavazzini, they serve as unprecedented and vegetal xenia — the paintings ancient Romans used to welcome esteemed guests.


The series Domestic Landscape reflects Bardino’s interest in composition and the juxtaposition of various plant species. The artist arranges the plants freely on the canvas, disregarding dimensional accuracy or realistic detail. Leaves and branches are positioned based solely on visual needs, creating an improbable but possible world that is, in essence, chromatic harmony and pure painting.


Composizione (“Composition”), specifically designed to occupy one of the bookshelves in Appartamento Cavazzini, depicts the dark silhouette of a kentia palm against a distant backdrop. The plant is likely positioned in front of a glass window, with a glimpse of the luminous external world visible through it, knocking softly on the viewer’s perspective.


Specchio (“Mirror”), humorously titled as a counterpoint to its placement in a wardrobe, suggests an imaginary piece of garden reflected on a mirrored surface. With saturated colours and a morning brightness, Bardino uses the title to alert viewers that they are not directly observing the lush plants but seeing them incidentally. We do not see the plants, but the plants themselves manifest before our gaze.


The piece Tenda (“Curtain”), intended for a bathroom’s internal window, is painted on an unprimed surface of an actual apartment curtain. Imagined as not entirely flat, with slight gathers near the top attachments, the artwork features a large central kentia palm painted with a limited palette. The softly and gesturally outlined leaves appear to move gently, caressed by a faint breeze.


Verdure (“Greens”) is a large-scale work populated by a wide variety of house and garden plants, arranged in a completely free and anarchic manner. The painting serves as a sort of catalogue of domestic greenery, presented in a paratactic form. Its title, a playful nod to the colour of the plants, conveys the idea of a primordial, overflowing vitality in the vegetal world.