A staircase rises through a tunnel of vegetation, the stone treads barely visible in the shadow of what presses in from both sides. The foliage is dense, subtropical in its exuberance, entirely indifferent to the stone balustrade that waits at the top of the frame: classical, ordered, pale. John Stathatos photographs the passage between wilderness and civility: a path that has been laid in stone but is actively being reclaimed, each step a negotiation between what was designed and what has decided otherwise.
A staircase rises through a tunnel of vegetation, the stone treads barely visible in the shadow of what presses in from both sides. The foliage is dense, subtropical in its exuberance, entirely indifferent to the stone balustrade that waits at the top of the frame: classical, ordered, pale. John Stathatos photographs the passage between wilderness and civility: a path that has been laid in stone but is actively being reclaimed, each step a negotiation between what was designed and what has decided otherwise.
This image belongs to Part II of The Garden of the Hesperides (1993), the series in which Stathatos traces the myth of the Hesperides through three sites embodying successive stages of the European imagination’s relationship to Arcadia. Part II is the garden at Villa Carnevale, Pugliola, Italy: a neo-classical design by its British owner in the nineteenth century, a Northern European fantasy of Greek landscape, now being absorbed by the nature it sought to frame. The pathway Stathatos photographs leads to the garden’s upper terrace, but the eye cannot reach it; the vegetation has closed the passage.
The tunnel the overgrowth creates is not incidental: it is the spatial embodiment of the series’ argument. The Gardens of the Hesperides, in every incarnation, exist just beyond reach: promised but not arrived at. The darkness of the path against the brightness at the top is a threshold composition, and in Stathatos’s practice the threshold is consistently where the most interesting work takes place: the point between states, where what is coming has not yet resolved.
