Fiorenzo Pilia, Il giardino fantastico / The fantastic garden

pictures (2013) courtesy of Gerda Seppenster/Andries de Jong

The Italian isle of Sardinia has a sculpture garden with some very special characteristics.

Life and works

Fiorenzo Pilia (b. 1933), a farmer who didn't enjoy much formal education and had no artistic training, in 1993 at age sixty began making sculptures, which he displayed in his orchard of some 4000 m².

Like so many other self-taught artists he uses residual material, but a special feature of his constructions is, that he applies various contemporary materials such as resin, cable waste and scrap of modern production processes. 

One of the special constructions of the garden is a sculpture of a lying female, as in above picture, some 15 meters long, made by applying a mixture of foam and glue to a model from chicken wire. The inside of this sculpture, which can be entered via a door between the two legs, shows internal organs made of various wire-work and cable material.

This creation represents the mystery of life. It took Pilia some four years to complete it.

However, the garden has many more creative constructions, such as a towery structure (picture above) that represents one of the former New York Twin Towers during the 9-11 attack.

There are scenes of grouped people, often very colorful, on top of a rather large pedestal.
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Such a pedestal may have a hidden door that opens to a surprise.

One will also come next to a strange flying machine and kind of a crocodile with a tail in the form of a hand, as shown below.

Pilia likes working with gauze, chicken wire and other iron material, which he transforms for example into a more than life-sized figure facing the sky. 

Fiorenzo Pilia's fantastic garden is about a kilometer outside the Sardinian community of San Sperate, which has some fame as a "village of artists", initiated in 1968 by Italian sculptor Pinuccio Sciola.

Documentation

* Article and pictures in the Costruttori di Babele website (in Italian)

* Il Giardino Fantastico is on Facebook (from march 2012 on)
* A set of pictures (June 2013) on my Flickr page

* Article (January 2021) by Danila de Pasquale on website Mam-marketing

Video
* Video "Il mistero dell donna" by Nodux2 (10'57", YouTube, 

May 2011)

Fiorenzo Pilia

Giardino fantastico

Strada di San Sperate a Decimomannu

San Sperate, Sardegna, Italy

can be visited when the artist is at the location

first published February 2012, last revised March 2022

A new web magazine: Bric-à-Brac

Bric-à-Brac is a new Spanish web magazine that will focus upon the multidisciplinary study of selftaught art, outsider art, art brut, i.e. in general all kinds of creative activity in the margin of Art with a capital A..

This magazine, a subdivision of the spanish web magazine Revista Sans Soleil, Estudios de la imagen, will be edited by Gabriele Garcìa Muñoz, who has a PhD on the thesis Procesos Creativos en Artistas Outsider (Madrid 2010, Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and who authors the weblog El Hombre Jazmin.

The theme of the first edition will be Arquitecturas y entornos outsider. Reyes, inventores, santos y héroes (Outsider architecture and environments. Kings, inventors, saints and heroes). Articles for this edition, which have to meet professional standards, are expected before June 1st, 2012. More information on the various pages of the Bric-à-Brac  website.

This initiative may be welcomed as a sign of ever growing professional and academic interest in the field of outsider art.

(update 2017: the links to the Bric a Brac website are not operational anymore, so they have been removed)

Auguste Corsin, La villa des rochers / The villa of rocks

this color picture and the other one below (2011) 
courtesy of Jacques Corbel

Until recently not much has been published about Auguste Corsin's Villa of rocks in Étampes, France. Most items of his sculpture garden have gone lost and it seems he himself has come into oblivion. 

However, end 2011 this changed.

A documentary review published on the website "Corpus Étampois"

On December 29, 2011, the website Corpus Étampois, that deals with various interesting features of the French city of Étampes and documents its history, has published a documentary review of life and works of Auguste Corsin. 

This web page has a lot of pictures and includes an extensive documentation. Some data, however, still are missing, so this publication is also a call in order to supplement these.

postcard of the front garden (around 1915?) 

as published on the Corpus Étampes website

Life and work

Auguste Corsin (1861-1929) was an employee (machinist, a job of standing) of the French railways, who served in particular on the Paris-Orleans line. He was born in Montluçon and settled in 1892 in Étampes, a city south of Paris.

In the early years of the 20th century, somewhere between 1901 and 1904, he built a house along the Boulevard St Michel (nowadays nr. 50), where he settled with his family.

During many years Auguste Corsin has been working hard to decorate the garden facing the street. 

The pictures in this post give an impression of the decorations on the columns, that are part of the fence along the street. The sculptures and other items that decorated the garden itself, meanwhile for the most part have gone lost . 

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But there should have been sculptures of various birds, bears, lions, and monkeys climbing a palm tree. 

Images of the creations have been saved, because the garden appears briefly in a film that was shown in the French pavilion of the International Exposition 1939 in New York (Violon d'Ingres, 1938, 30 min, by Jacques-Bernard Brunius, available on DVD). Stills from this film are on the Corpus Étampois website. Take a look (text in French, but a lot of images).

In the 1930s Auguste Corsin's creations enjoyed the interest of surrealist artists from Paris, like these artists also were interested in facteur Cheval's Palais Idéal. 

Auguste Corsin currently may be in oblivion, his work lives on at the Étampes website.

Auguste Corsin

La villa des rochers

(formerly) Boulevard Saint Michel

Étampes, dept Essonne, region Île de France, France

garden mostly gone lost