Open studio Ailanthus
Ailanthus, residency project at Casa degli Artisti, Milan, 2026
English translation generated with AI from the original Italian text.
Francesco Ciavaglioli’s research develops around the botanical image as a device through which to question the relationship between human beings, nature and the construction of landscape. For years the garden has been the core of his practice: at once an iconographic subject, a cultural space and a place where ideas of care, control and order come up against nature’s autonomous capacity to transform, proliferate and escape the systems that seek to contain it. Through seriality, the repetition of gesture and the use of images drawn from botanical archives, the artist builds landscapes that constantly oscillate between representation and abstraction, between document and visual construction.
Ailanthus, developed during the residency at Casa degli Artisti, continues this research by focusing on Ailanthus altissima, commonly known as the Tree of Heaven. The name of the genus, coined by the French botanist René Louiche Desfontaines in 1788, comes from the Latinisation of the word ailanto, which literally means “tree that reaches the sky”, while the epithet altissima underlines its rapid and imposing growth. The imagery evoked by the name now clashes with the plant’s status as an invasive species, turning the ailanthus into an emblematic figure of the contradictions running through the contemporary landscape. Considered one of the most widespread invasive species, it is able to colonise residual spaces, infrastructure, buildings and disused urban areas.
Its presence tells a story of migrations, adaptations and unforeseen consequences, showing how every attempt to organise the landscape inevitably produces new ecosystems, configurations and balances. During the residency, Ciavaglioli carried out iconographic and historical-botanical research on the ailanthus through photographs, drawings, painting and ink. He developed a sensitive mapping of its presence, following the plant into the places where human control breaks off: roadsides, urban voids, walls, roofs, architecture in transformation. The ailanthus thrives precisely within ecological disturbance, in territories altered by humans, becoming the symbol of a nature that does not oppose the city but grows along with it, taking possession of its fractures.
The installation presented for the open studio days at Casa degli Artisti turns the studio into a hortus conclusus, a contemporary camera picta in which the garden loses its traditional role as a refuge and becomes an unstable ecosystem, shaped by continuous proliferation and transformation. The painted curtain has a double function: pictorial surface and architectural device. It delimits the space without closing it, builds an immersive environment and gathers the outcomes of the research like an archive in constant becoming. Painting, which in the artist’s practice is never exhausted by the surface of the canvas, thus expands into space, turning the exhibition environment into an inhabitable image.
Completing the installation, a series of paintings hangs from thin sculptural battens that cross the space, giving rise to a constellation of floating representations that dissolve the boundaries between painting, sculpture and installation.
Conceived as a research project, Ailanthus deliberately remains open. Born at Casa degli Artisti, the project will continue to feed on its encounters with the context, the city and the relationships the residency has made possible, which become an integral part of the process. The research will converge into a publication gathering its outcomes together with theoretical contributions by botanists, ecologists and scholars of the contemporary landscape, widening the dialogue between artistic practice and interdisciplinary research. Like the ailanthus itself, the project keeps developing by propagation, welcoming new images, new connections and new readings of the contemporary landscape.