“La collina degli alberi morti”

Great pedunculate oaks found buried under the gravel during the digging of the Oasis, brought back to the surface and rebuilt into a hill by Sebastiano De Laurentiis.

The story

During the excavation work to lay out the Serranella nature oasis, large trees were found buried in the gravel several metres down, mostly pedunculate oaks. The local place names — “Selva Piana”, “Selva d'Altino” — recall the wide lowland forests that once filled the river corridors.

That is how the artist Sebastiano A. De Laurentiis came to plan his work “La collina degli alberi morti” (The Hill of Dead Trees), inside the very Oasis that stretches across the territories of Casoli, Sant'Eusanio and Altino, to call up the histories and the changes of this land.

De Laurentiis works with forms already present in the landscape: ellipses, voids, spirals, expansions. The work speaks of the environment, of nature, of the landscape and its changes. Above all it is the landscape of nothing, of the void, of an absence — ours — that gives the advantage to what is full. The “hill” is in fact a broad mound of sand dredged from the river: on it the artist recovered and set large trunks dragged up by the current, together with clumps of broom, dog rose and other plants.

Sebastiano A. De Laurentiis

He was born in 1938 at Roccascalegna, one of the most enchanting villages in Abruzzo. The feelings stirred by the landscape of Abruzzo took hold of an artistic and poetic temperament; he felt a growing need to engage with it, to show it proudly to others, pointing out fragments and sights that can escape the distracted eye of modern life.

At only 21 he made his début at the Rome Quadriennale with a work of great emotional force, “Le sbarre” (The Bars), made by assembling 72,000 burnt matches and swastikas, enclosed in an iron grate taken from an old prison. Its success placed him among the most promising artists: he was called to Germany, where he worked between Berlin, Basel and Cologne, and from there began to travel, taking part in group shows in Prague, in Sweden, in Norway and in New York.

Forced to leave Rome in the 1990s, De Laurentiis returned for good to the land he came from. His interest in nature became pressing: ears of corn, leaves, trees, stones, seeds and clods became his pictures, pieces torn from a natural mosaic whose beauty the artist wanted to break up in order to reawaken knowledge of it. In 1996 he became the driving force behind the “Arte Natura” project. He died in the summer of 2019, at the age of 81.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible what is not always so.