Hortis Haeram has the quality of a garden from another world: the cool, layered haven of the ancient Roman hortus, fresh and welcoming, where leaf is seen through leaf and the greens multiply beyond counting, but also the enchanted gardens of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where beauty becomes a spell and time itself no longer applies. Not the few greens we habitually think of when we think of color, but a multitude of greens that shift and breathe, endlessly multiplying, a gentle jungle to get lost in.
Hortis Haeram has the quality of a garden from another world: the cool, layered haven of the ancient Roman hortus, fresh and welcoming, where leaf is seen through leaf and the greens multiply beyond counting, but also the enchanted gardens of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where beauty becomes a spell and time itself no longer applies. Not the few greens we habitually think of when we think of color, but a multitude of greens that shift and breathe, endlessly multiplying, a gentle jungle to get lost in.
The brushstrokes press and layer the way leaves do, each one complete before it finds its place in the whole. Vanni builds the composition into the canvas, then builds it again onto a transparent support laid over it, each stroke lifted and placed back, sometimes following its original direction, sometimes turned against it, the way a leaf placed on a surface carries the memory of the branch it grew on. Two paintings made whole again: sometimes in fusion, sometimes leaving the discrepancies evident, assembled with the care of an archaeologist piecing together fragments of a language he is trying to decipher.
Vanni draws on Pierre Bonnard's Nabi inheritance of warm colors generating luminosity through adjacency rather than spectral intensity, the garden as a total chromatic environment rather than a subject observed from outside: a vegetal world fully inhabited rather than depicted. Vanni's answer is structural: the surface envelops rather than presents, and where Monet's Nymphéas dissolve into atmosphere, here each stroke arrives as a discrete presence, the surface asserting itself as built object. One hundred and fifty years after Impressionism, the garden is painted with a post-Informale consciousness: immersive and constructed simultaneously.
