The intensity of the relationship between man and the natural world has, over the years, expressed itself in all its fullness and variety through the portrayal of natural, animal, and plant forms. In accordance with the evolution of thought through the ages, and the consequent changes in man’s relationship with the phenomenal world, the illustration of the natural datum has gradually been characterised by a symbolic/interpretative vision, often idealised, or by a more objective and realistic representation, rendered artistically according to the principles of mimesis. Man has matched his curiosity and wonder at the forms of nature, and his need to deepen his knowledge of them, with an equal intensity in his art – drawing, painting, sculpture – and the methods and practices of science.

The handmade paper and the canvases of Ruth Moro are records of a long and fascinating route which leads from the medieval illuminated manuscripts to the conceptual experiences of the second half of the C20th, when the natural elements – trees, flowers, leaves, fruits, rocks – are no longer rendered in graphic or pictorial terms, but physically enter the spaces and works of art. A close examination of the evolution of the relation between art and nature over the years, inevitably partial and subjective, could prove useful in gaining access to the poetic of Ruth Moro.

The illustrations of animals and plants of the famous Codex Aniciae Julianae – the oldest illuminated manuscript, dating back to the 6th Century, known also as the Vienna Dioscorides, and in particular the portrayals contained in the part related to the herbarium in the Dioscorides Neapolitanus, preserved in the National Library of Naples, present the naturalism characteristic of drawings whose essential task was to describe the form, the natural environment and the curative properties of the various plants. The universe of the medieval imagination revealed itself in the herbaria, often characterised by illustrations that were the fruit of fancy and invention rather than direct observation of plants and flowers. A significant development in the representation of natural elements became apparent during the Renaissance, thanks to a more scientific and objective approach to the natural datum, in the search for a more realistic rendering in the drawing of plants and animals. In this sense the sheets of Leonardo or Albrecht Dürer are exemplary. Dedicated to the study of animals and plants, they are extraordinary copies from life, the result of a meticulous observation of the real.

1735 saw the publication of Systema Naturae by Carl von Linné, a work which sets out a systematisation of knowledge through the rational classification of the animal, vegetable and mineral world in accordance with a new method of observing nature, one bearing the stamp of the Enlightenment. This new manner of observing and classifying reality is reflected in the way in which the various species are portrayed. They are reproduced with purely scientific intent in illustrations whose accuracy of detail anticipates the truth of the photographic image.

During the C19th, photography reveals fresh visions of the phenomenal world, and exerts a profound influence upon artistic practices, establishing new relations between art and science. Microphotography discloses to artists the astonishing structures of plants and flowers, thereby offering new iconographic themes. It is known, for example, how the relationship between the botanist Armand Clavaud and the artist Odilon Redon had enabled the latter to insert into his symbolist compositions elements derived directly from botany, entomology and geology.

The important scientific and technological discoveries of the three decades of the second industrial revolution, between 1870 and 1900, have a profound influence on many aspects of life and on ways of observing the world; but they also reverberate decisively in the linguistic revolutions that affect art on its road to the C20th. In the opening years of the C20th western art frees itself from its obsession with form; the expressive content emancipates itself from the object of the representation: colour, sign and matter become autonomous means of expression. The relationship with nature no longer manifests itself through the representation of an independent physical reality, but rather by means of an approach centred upon sensitive experience. For Paul Klee “the artist is himself part of nature” and should know how to capture “the voice of nature”. In a poem of 1914, the artist provides an illuminating key to understanding the creative process: “The creation lives as genesis beneath the visible surface of the work. All intelligent people see this after the fact, but only the creative see it before the fact – in the future”. Thanks to the surmounting of every form of academism, new and extraordinary opportunities open up in the relationship between art and nature. For Piet Mondrian, master of neoplasticism, the aim of art is to succeed in translating into a figurative language the truth of nature. In a letter written in 1914 to Hans-Peter Bremmer, often quoted for its great significance, Mondrian expresses once and for all the principles of his painting: “For when I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, it is with the aim of portraying 'universal beauty' as consciously as possible. Nature (or that which I see) inspires me, provides me – as it does every painter – with the emotion by which I am moved to create something, but I want to approach the truth as closely as possible, abstracting everything until I come to the foundation – still only an outward foundation! – of things…. I believe that it is possible by means of horizontal and vertical lines, constructed 'consciously' but not 'calculating', guided by a higher intuition and brought to harmony and rhythm – I believe that these fundamental aesthetic shapes – where necessary supplemented by lines in other directions or curved lines, make it possible to arrive at a work of art which is as strong as it is true.” Mondrian has created numerous drawings and paintings of trees that document the extent to which his intense creative journey, striving to reach a progressive synthesis of forms, is centred upon his in-depth study of nature. As he makes clear in his letter, the abstraction in his works is the result of observing the fundamental forms of nature’s beauty.

In 1928 Karl Blossfeldt’s Urformen der Kunst was published in Germany, a genuine hymn to the beauty of nature. The photographic volume follows the typology of the herbaria and presents 120 black and white plates of flowers and plants with their Latin names, followed by their everyday names in German. The objectivity of the photographs, taken with a camera modified by Blossfeldt himself in order to obtain close-ups that enlarge the subject up to 30 times their actual size, confers upon the plant forms an aspect both monumental and statuesque. The marvellous archetypal forms of nature in Urfomen der Kunst reveal the profound cross-references between botany, art and architecture; it is not surprising that since its publication Blossfeldt’s book has been highly regarded and used by artists as a source of inspiration, and still today this unique photographic herbarium maintains all its aesthetic importance in the field of contemporary art.

In the second half of the 1960’s there was, internationally, a radical calling into question of both artistic practices and the very function of art through the movement, in reality itself distinctly heterogeneous, of conceptual art, an aesthetic orientation that entails, amongst other consequences, the redefining of the very foundations of the art-nature relationship. In its broadest sense, conceptual art favours the mental dimension of art, and is centred upon an intellectual exploration which draws upon structural linguistics and Zen philosophy, but at the same time is stated in multiple artistic experiences such as behavioural art, minimal art, land art or l’arte povera. By way of land art, art escapes from its appointed places, the museums and galleries, in order to deal with nature’s spaces: deserts, mountains, rivers, seas. The natural environment becomes the space in which often monumental works put forward unprecedented perceptual experiences. At the same time, nature physically enters the places of art: flowers, plants, pollen, grass, wax, stones, water, rice – materials till then foreign to artistic practice become constituent elements of the work. The concepts and the most important creative processes of this artistic season were presented in a production of Harald Szeemann’s in the Bern Art Gallery entitled When Attitudes Become Forms (1969), an exhibition rapidly to become an indispensable point of reference for contemporary artistic practices, and which also constitutes a definitive turning point for a renewed feeling of nature in art.

The artistic discourse of Ruth Moro is to be found in the overcoming of the conceptual requirements which marked the end of the last century; in fact, what prevails in her works is indubitably the pictorial dimension over the mental. And yet, the rigour in the strategy the artist adopts in realising her own works recalls creative processes that are among the most marked in present-day art and that have their origin in the conceptual field.

Starting from her initial interest in the procedures for making paper with vegetable fibres, and the techniques for producing by hand the Japanese washi paper, the artist has developed her own procedure to obtain the raw material essential for her art: the veining of bracts, sepals and elm seeds.

The first action in creating the work of Ruth Moro is the gathering of the plants. In this preliminary phase the artist must tune her own activity to the cycle of the seasons, must establish what the right moment is in order to get the best result. The time factor – that of the picking, of the complex and tiring process to obtain the structure of the plant with its cellulose, and of the succeeding painstaking assembly of the structures – is an integral part of Ruth Moro’s poetic. To match the times of art with the rhythms of nature requires a philosophical and/or spiritual component in the act of creation. In present-day art addressed to the natural environment, the attention to time, both biological and mental, is often accompanied also with the retrieval of the value of making. An example of this is the work of Giuseppe Penone, an eminent artist of arte povera who centres his own sculpture on the art-nature relationship. In the creation of certain works, the artist hollows out large-size trunks to allow the emergence of the form of an initial phase in the growth of the plant, thereby evoking the Michaelangelo idea of removing the substance that hides the form, a procedure similar to that practised by Ruth Moro in her removal of the soft parts to reveal the internal structure of the plants.

Ruth Moro develops her own works in thematic cycles that can be traced back to specific plants: Equisetum telmateia, Hydrangea quercifolia, Firmania simplex, Tilia, Acer – each plant possesses a unique structure which the artist reveals by putting together the individual elements in such a way as to obtain the textures and rhythms characteristic of her pictorial work. Over the years the artist has experimented with various means of support, in search of a balance between the specific properties of resistance and transparency of the leaves, obtained by putting together the plant structures, and the rendering in chromatic and pictorial terms of the pages mounted on canvas or wood. The skill acquired in the technical realisation gives the artist great liberty in the use of so unaccustomed a means of expression, capable of expressing all the harmony and beauty inherent in natural forms. The distinctive herbarium of Ruth Moro reveals the extent to which the microscopic structures of plants present surprising similarities with the forms of art: a paper of a whitened Acer platanoides shows signs that recall the figures of Klee, the Firmiana simplex in the diptych “Sfogliando il verde I e II” recalls the diaphanous wings of the dragonfly on a vase of Gallé’s, while other papers are characterised by whirling structures which call to mind Pollock’s dripping.

In the cycle of works dedicated to the Hydrangea quercifolia on the other hand, the fractal nature of the works is clearly shown, a feature that goes back to mathematics as the basic principle of the harmony and beauty of nature.

The exhibition reveals the artist’s profound interest in the marvels of nature, celebrated in a striking artistic proposition in which art and botany meet. Ruth Moro renews the concept of the herbarium by intertwining a scientific approach with a refined artistic practice of great sensitivity. In the context of the exhibition in the Cantonal Natural History Museum, the contemplative dimension of her works opens up fresh and fascinating paths of reading.

The other (allied to the first) considers the artist’s work as a journey towards a revelation by way of all the technical stages experienced as moments in a progress, moments in an alchemical transformation leading to the discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone. The last great period of nature-as-teacher dates back to the turn of the Nineteenth Century and the various movements associated with Art-Nouveau. But this was primarily concerned with decoration, or at most it stopped short at the Language of Flowers. In modern art, nature is dense matter, primordial substance which is then turned into thick textures that act as a medium for individual expression. Certain of Klee’s results (especially in the “gardens” series) relate to a reading of natural phenomena, more by chance concurrence than by an analysis of the signs inherent in nature - identifying basic rhythms rather than listening to one particular voice. The wings of the butterfly, the thick leaves used by Dubuffet are also material, different in origin but similar in result, to be used in an expression reduced to its larval level.
To recover those two approaches I mentioned at the beginning, which are religious approaches, present in Medieval times and in all traditional cultures, one must enter two fields of study that do not belong to the artistic procedure proper, even though they have frequently intersected it: the symbol, the archetype in C.G.Jung, and certain of Adolf Portmann’s books that have identified in the forms of life (both animal and vegetable) an aesthetic force which refers to a fundamental will to divine beauty. Every so often, in the panorama of the century just ended, some isolated voice seems to reaffirm that art, as a human activity, is a recognition of this will to beauty which the artist, through his talent and the various elaborative processes to which he subjects himself, restores with the humility of one who knows that the more the transposition of the images from the other world is accomplished with the least interference of a self-satisfied ego, the more perfect is the work born of his hands. It is the redeeming impulse of the Zen monk who paints the bamboo branch after having identified himself with it. It is the true spirit of the Guilds of those same Medieval times: learn the art and then put it aside. Everything I have been recounting – and I beg pardon of the artist with whom I should have occupied myself immediately – is found in exemplary measure in the by now almost ten-year long study by Ruth Moro who, I confess to my embarrassment, I have come to know only recently. She is spoken about in newspaper articles and on television and, doubts arise, more as an exceptional case than as an essential message. Ruth Moro has exhibited mostly outside Ticino, even as far as Japan where she is much appreciated and has won a prize. Her mode of procedure has been precisely described in important articles by Maria Will and Claudio Guarda: the choice, during the good season, of the samara of the Norway Maple and the Sycamore Maple, the bracts of the Greenspire, the stelae of the Giant Horsetail, the petals of the Oakleaf Hydrangea, the fruit of the Chinese Parasol Tree and the stelae of the Moor Grass, to mention the vegetal matter most used, then the cooking of the material in caustic soda to the point where one arrives, through the elimination of the impurities, at the naked texture of the leaf, the bract, the samara, the petal: which is the network which conveys the sap, namely the life of the plant (its soul, according to the artist) till it reaches the leaves’ extremities. The procedure adopted by Ruth Moro starts from the making of paper by hand out of vegetal fibres. But in this singular, expressive practice the result is no longer a more-or-less valuable and variously utilizable medium but rather the structure, the network, themselves to become protagonists with their component elements rendered visible and thereby exalted in their essential nervature, in the rhythm they suggest. The writers I mentioned first have spoken of an alchemical process, and so too has the artist herself in an interview conducted by her husband. It is the process I pointed to at the beginning of this article: searching for the truth by means of a devoted application of a series of techniques which in their constraint become liberating, to the extent that they open our eyes, they illuminate. Not the liberation of him who picks out elements as his mood dictates, but of a patient, methodical search (which includes rather than excludes admiration for the forms of nature) working upon the vegetal matter’s resistance to the treatments it is subjected to. This explains why the artist, confronting the variety of forms the vegetable world offers, dwells only upon a few species, sufficiently solid in structure, but with a nervature that is clear, elegant and rich in variants. In the conversation with her husband, Ruth describes her routine, which is more a journey, a progress towards a destination, ever renewed, an inner voyage in which an action places its trust in an actual temporal span within a decidedly concrete context: the year marked by the growth and development of the plants, gathering and selecting them, the various procedures.
On their frail supports they harbour their quintessence, that soul revealed by the delicate filigree of their nervature. Their structures have determined the rhythm which has become composition: signs which record mysterious alphabets, with the wings of the seed of the maple, the sails of the lime blossom which, with veiling and overlapping, determine a laying-out frequently more densely chromatic, the rounded petals of the hydrangea which conduce to circular, spiral, labyrinthine courses, the horsetail which is transformed into a thick weave of matter where the form of the plant has totally disappeared. In the Ascona exhibition the majority of the compositions are mounted on wooden boards, then there are transparent weaves in their plexiglass holders, and some examples of silkscreen printing. The vegetal species chosen are the maple and the lime. Ruth Moro has responded to the invitation of the delicate vegetal structures which she has identified, gathered, and selected; she has listened to their song and with her nimble hands has constructed frail networks which have captured a little light, a little life; she has become the privileged interpreter of an immense score of a thousand variegated harmonies. It is not by chance that she has called the present exhibition Monochrome Sounds; too modestly, I would say, since it is all about music!

It is strange, in fact, how such an activity, so closely and exclusively rooted in the material of which it consists, should then lead to results so distant from that material to the point even of annulling it.
Nevertheless, when confronting the compositions of Ruth Moro, however instinctive and right the reference may be to fabrics, designs, paintings, even to stained glass (and do not doubt but that further possibilities may arise) their fidelity to their own origin and to their own vegetal substance is indisputable and even, paradoxically, thereby reassured: the smallest expressive unit – the mark – which characterises the individual works is in fact bestowed by nothing other than the structure itself of the vegetal element, chosen from time to time as in “instrument” by the artist (the helices of the maple seeds, tha bracts of the firmiana rather than the stems of the horsetail or the petals of the hydrangea, which together with the bracts of the lime are the artist’s favourite vegetal fibres.
And it is precisely within the precarious balancings of the highly subtle game presented by this contradiction that Ruth Moro works: to be in control of the game will mean, then, to conduct the ends of a personal search a material which brings up its own powers and characteristics, a material which becomes an interlocutor.
Evidently we are in the technical field here, but equally we are somewhere beyond. The art of papera s interpreted by Ruth Moro, who entrusts to it the expression of her own creativity, reveals itself as an intimate and inextricable union of the pratical and the ideative – or more properly the creative – moments. This is entirely in harmony with that conception of art which within modern western civilisation has been ever more asserted as the synthesis of all the faculties of the individual. In alternative to the esclusive franchise of the merely intellectual faculty. Ruth Moro’s work also responds in substance to the need to reveal and put into circulation the harmony between the individual and the universe, between the self and the other-than-self. Thus the voice of the artist ceases to be a singula voice in order to become a voice that will contain multiplicity.
The voice, or better the song, that issues forth from the work of Ruth Moro is very gentle, and unfolds itself in a simple, direct, taut poetry to catch fugitive images in their flight; evanescent as the paper in whose meshes that poetry is spellbound.
The opposites which give birth and life to Ruth Moro’s work have their extreme formulation in the contrast between the darkness of the hard and rigorous labour which it involves and the self-assertion in the light of the structure of the work itself; in the opposition between the chaos of the original mass and the harmonious order imposed by the intervention of the artist.
It is, in fact, to the light that the artist finally delivers her compositions, in order that she may give them the final seal of the impossibility of any lasting definition: designed in air by means of theeir transparency or elevated in their intricacy from a studied depth, these compositions – which becom compositions of light – change with the changes of the light, becoming part of the inexorable flux of time that transforms everything.

Translation Nick Carter

However, if by a strange fate those signs, instead of being superimposed, could emerge from within, not those which man traces with his hand but those inner ones, hidden under the garments of their vegetal element – past the beauty of leaves and flowers to arrive,instead, at the supporting elements within the fibres of the tissue – perhaps, before our very eyes, there would be revealed the wonder of a new discovery, and we would behold the primary forms of vegetal structure, their harmonious rhythms, their amazing tonal accord, the humble Franciscan poetry of coloured flowers and grass – “coloriti fiori et herba”. Which is precisely the highest and, at one time, the simplest and most natural quality of this different way of making paper from plants.
Ruth Moro’s is a silent ritual performed in parallel to the wide circling of the sun and the season’s arc: it begins with the gathering of the primary elements, the leaves, flowers and seeds which abundant nature generously bestows of disseminates upon the ground at various times and in various ways. Only later, in the absorption of her atelier, secluded and immersed in greenery, will this matter be patiently selected, worked, cooked, washed, purified until the intimate supporting structure is laid bare, namely, that subtle maze of veins and arteries which branch out from a central nerve. The processi s meticulous and delicate, observing the slow cadence of winter days; buti t is of these lengthy periods that there is born success, for it is in this prolonged wait – which becomes both ausculation and dialogue – that the primary structures suggest their course.
What characterises this higly delicate paper of Ruth Moro’s is that in the moment of its creation the artist does not impose herself upon the materiel but encourages it, follows it, lets herself be guided by its forms and its voices; somehow she makes a sort of controlled space within herself so as to be permeated by what nature itself dictates. Behind these works of hers, then, there is not simply a search for aesthetic results, but an attitude of mind and spirit, a receptiveness to the encounter, a different way of looking at and relating to nature, of living with it, in step with it and with its rhythms.
There emerge results of both considerable charm and simplicity: at times more declaratory and strucutral, when the composition favours and accentuates the rigid stress of the paper’s backbone; at others, more pictural and atmospheric when, in the free play of superimposition, unforeseeably there emerge, there, undulating lines and syncopated rhythms, variation in depth and colour with alternation of whites, greys and blacks which weave the surface of the sheet.
And while the eye remains enchanted with this secret world of delicate transparences, like curtains on the infinite stretched on gossamer, the mind cannot but wonder at the surprising affinities and intimate harmonies which, all of a sudden, seem to draw close to the artistic expressions themselves very distant from one another: from that found in certain C20th Europeans (in particular Klee) to the primitive or trival expressiveness of certain African or Oceanic peoples, from Amazonian tattoos to the decorations of fabric and walls, from the bark designs of the Mbuti, in Africa, to the coloured embroidery (Les molas) of the Kuna in Panama. It would be tempting to say that with this disclosed voice of nature, Moro lays bare the archetype that constitutes the common denominator of such different and distant artistic expressions.
These little pieces of paper art – but the harmony derives precisely from the innate rapport between the natural element and the proportionate space of its treatment – thus take on a fascination that jumps over time and curtails space: if laid bare and followed, the vegetal soul of nature reveals not only its structuring forms but also the poetry of its internal order; not only the functional character of its nervous system but also the secret music of its rhythms and colours; and the perfection of a petal which gives lif to the spread sheet, dictating rhythms and suggesting developments which are its own, the whole “music of the spheres” is renewed and expands, spheres struck and crossed by the light, microcosm and macrocosm in pursuit of each other, and meeting.
What is fascinating in Moro’s art is that it is made out of nothing; but patience, tenacity and the capacity to wait are its midwives, and everything lives in the faint watermark of a paper that opens onto a nature familiar to us and yet unknown, nevertheless inducing its secret soul to appear: from the robust tangle of the fibres to the light modulation of the veins, from the dense consistency of the “original” element to the order of a natural pattern. Until the airy architecture of her latest compositions, almost stained-glass – suggested by the vegetal matter’s own structure – through which filter the measure of an ancient order, the light of a distant horizon.
Results indubitably original, in which resounds the echo of new voices, the need to be profoundly in tune with nature, which, as our age in particular warns us, is urgent.

Translation Nick Carter

What is the best time to gather gingko? And maple, or molinia? And horsetail – do you want it white or brown? Every day one tries and tries again, and every day brings new, exciting revelations, or new disappointments. The emotions are strong and the magic of this alchemy, that of transforming a plant into a sheet of paper troubles the senses.
Over the years I have gone to investigate mor than eighty plants. The leaves, the barks, the stems or the fruits – but it is whith four or five of these especially that I work with daily, ever in search of new stimuli, new feelings.
In nature everything changes. The processi s continuous. What lies hidden behind the botanical appearance of a plant? Everything is to be discovered upon transforming the material.
The cooking is in caustic soda. The smell is acrid and penetrating, and the process a violento ne. At the end nothing remains but the structure, the skeleton of the plant with its cellulose. All the rest, as in a process of decomposition, has been eliminated. But when to stop this process? When are the originary characteristics of the plant revealed? When does the cellulose, which is the one and only legator present, show itself at its maximum efficiency? This is particularly difficult to decide, and so one tries and tries again.
And this trying and trying again i salso the search for something hidden, somethin secret, which at last reveals itself as the soul of the plant.
Then for hours one rinses. The last remaining impurities are eliminated. Therfore one bleaches and rinses, tinges the pulp and rinses again.
Only now does creation begin: fishing directly in the pulp with a wooden mould for sheets homogeneous in structure. This is the classical method. Or one works with a wooden frame which floats upon the water, one spreads the pulp and constructs by hand the composition, playing with the signs which every plant invites one to discover. I, the water and the plants work together. We collogue in search of something new, still hidden, all to be discovered. Or finally, using the loom as a support upon which to construct, exploiting those characteristics, those patterns which are inherent in every plant but not perceptible at first sight.
Composition is frequently complex, requiring time and persistence, but the sheets which are born are not simply paper: rather, they are paper and its signs, those of the soul of the plant, and they become sheets of their own autonomous force, their own original language.
And the ritual continues with the drying in the press, between cloths and cardboard which are repeatedly replaced until the drying is perfect, until one feels their fragile robustness between the fingers and sees their story before one’s eyes.

Translation Nick Carter