Imaginerie: Shiva Foresti

Below written blog post is from the critical by Marco Bombardieri

"What Shiva Foresti implements in his works is a refined and curious research on a subject that appears banal, but which is actually charged with various profound meanings: the leaf.

Strengthened by a remarkable technical skill, the result of academic studies, the young Shiva returns in his latest works some enlargements of dry leaves, performed with skill and attention to detail with the sole use of graphite.

In recent times, the artist has channeled all his energies into the study of the leaf, dedicating various works to it, many of which are of considerable size: the world of nature, and specifically the leaf, have always exercised a particular fascination on him. This predilection is linked - among other things - to a very variegated imaginary that connotes the dry leaf: as a symbol of fragility and transience it has been represented by many masters of the past with an allusion to the concept of memento mori.

Let us be clear, Shiva's works are not limited to being contemporary vanitates, but also conceal a solid connection with Eastern philosophy and, in the case of these works, with the Buddhist concept of impermanence, linked to change and becoming. Even the monumental dimensions of these works only amplify the mystical value of the representations. Faced with the essentiality of the leaf restored with graphite alone above a uniformly white surface it seems to be in front of the table of a precious fourteenth-century polyptych: the religious intensity, evidently stripped of the Christian-Jewish habit, now dresses a a more “natural” and universal meaning, in which east and west merge.

The silhouette of the leaf looms large, hieratic and motionless, on the white backdrop, in a timeless instant, as if it were a divinity of Nature that shows itself to our eye in its most naked, and at the same time solemn, fragility".

To learn more about this amazingly talented artist Shiva Foresti, you can read the Story of the Artist. 

To see his profile page and his collection, please visit Shiva Foresti's Profile Page.