Hand Leaf Butterfly

Riccardo Venturi

Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025

Hand The close-up of the palm of an open (left or right?) hand, that of the artist, is partially obscured by an ivy leaf. A stemless leaf, with a cordate base and a pointed, lobate apex; sinuous, undulating edges; the lamina rounded and unicostate, meaning that it has a single, primary vein which constitutes its central axis. It could represent either the upper surface, facing upwards, or the lower surface, facing downwards and with more prominent veining. 1 Certain lines on the hand overlap with certain veins on the leaf, as if they were extending out seamlessly from one surface to the other. We are far from the palm as a span or ancient unit of measurement, because what is being suggested here is a continuity — of whatever nature it may be — between the animal kingdom (of which human beings are obviously a part) and the realm of plants. This relationship owes precisely nothing to the centuries-long undervaluing of plants by our anthropocentric culture. That culture has never stopped influencing our way of perceiving the world, leading us to see, in this photograph, a dead leaf held by a hand with vital fluid flowing through its veins, like some vestige exhumed by the gesture of an archaeologist. And yet, as the botanist and biologist Francis Hallé has written, despite the turnover of the cells, 'an animal is alive or dead', whereas plants, thanks to morphogenesis, are able to get rid of organs that are no longer of any use to them: 'Falling leaves and the dropping of low branches do not have true equivalents among animals'; 'Contrary to animals, most plants are capable of dying at an extremity while continuing to grow at another point.' 2 They die and stay alive simultaneously, a condition that is difficult to imagine, as Hallé tries to do with the drawings that accompany his eulogy to plants. Co-incide (2023) is the title of the colour photograph (25 x 25 cm) chosen by the artist and the curators for Frangible; a title that does not connote an exact correspondence between the leaf and the hand, between the plant and human worlds, but a deeper trace, an incision between the cutaneous plicae and the plant lamina. The idea is not alien to botany, which compares the veining of plant species to our fingerprints. 3 In any case, in Co-incide, what is actually evoked, more than a simple continuity, is a hybridising or even a grafting between two life forms — something that appears here not for the first time in Elisabetta Di Maggio’s work. It is a process that applies equally to the small scale of a leaf resting on the palm of a hand and to the large scale of a water lily like Victoria amazonica. The correspondences are not based on pre-set dimensions. We are far removed from those mythological stories in which human beings are transmuted into flowers or plants, such as Hyacinth, Narcissus, or Daphne, which 1 See Rosa Camoletto, 'La foglia e l’evoluzione vegetale', in Rosa Camoletto and Angelo Garoglio (eds.), Vedere foglia. Forma struttura colore (Turin: Regione Piemonte, 2008), pp. 16–53. 2 Francis Hallé, In Praise of Plants, trans. David Lee (Portland: Timber Press, 2002), p. 96. Originally published in French as Éloge de la plante. Pour une nouvelle biologie (Paris: Seuil, 1999), p. 126. 3 See, for example, Edred John Henry Corner, The Life of Plants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025 2 have challenged painters and sculptors to capture the moment of transformation in which the human becomes vegetal — to represent metamorphosis in action. For example, the moment in which Daphne’s fingers stretch out monstrously to become laurel leaves and branches, as her hair turns into fronds and her feet into roots; in other words, before the ramification is finished and all that remains of her hand, her arm and the rest of her body is a vertical trunk and an evergreen crown facing the sky. For its part, Co-incide captures a more modest gesture of ostension, representing someone who has just picked a leaf up off the ground — a gesture, though, that contains multitudes. Leaf I imagine Elisabetta Di Maggio, far from her studio and from the ambiguities of contemporary art, picking leaves. An apparently boring and repetitive task: leaves resemble each other and they repeat to such an extent that, like trees, precise morphologies can be attributed to them. Because plants, 'despite all their efforts “to express themselves” […] only manage to repeat a million times over the same expression, the same leaf. […] They think they can say everything, blanket the world with assorted words; but all they are saying is “trees”. […] Always the same leaf, always the same way of unfolding, the same limits; leaves always symmetrical to each other, symmetrically hung. Try another leaf. — The same! Once more. — Still the same!' 4 So, before autumn comes, frustrating their every effort, 'they pass the time complicating their own form', or 'they simply multiply their arms, their hands, their fingers', 'a monstrous increment of their bodies, an irremediable excrescence'. Nothing but 'a flood, a vomiting of green': this is a reliable definition — albeit perhaps not a very noble one — of spring, to use the words of the poet Francis Ponge. In his comparison of fauna and flora, Ponge considers plants as being destined, almost condemned, to produce the same leaf. In a similar way to crystals, they are shot through with 'a will to formation' but limited at the same time by the 'impossibility of forming any other way': 'Plant expression is written, once and for all. No way of retracting, no repenting possible: correcting means adding.’ Like a book followed by innumerable corrections, indeed, it was Ponge himself who encouraged the comparison with writing when he exhorted poets to water their compositions. Could the advice also be valid for Elisabetta Di Maggio’s scalpel designs, which permit no changes of mind? Expression — deliberately associated with artistic practice over the centuries — is here negated, replaced by a baroque caprice or (leaving aside an artistic reference dating back at least to the blossoming of Gothic architecture) by an excrescence, the cultural history of which has yet to be properly delineated. For artistic expression, the examples abound, whereas for visual excrescence, we find ourselves in difficulty, as if we had first to free ourselves from the pejorative connotations of the term, from its parasitic nature, from its associations with an illness that crusts over on the skin. We 4 Francis Ponge, 'Fauna and Flora', in The Voice of Things, trans. Beth Archer (New York: McGraw- Hill: 1974), pp. 15, 40–41, 63–66. Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025 3 are far from the act of creation. How should we view an excrescentia that, with respect to the expressus (something that has been made to come out and has crystallised into a well-defined form), continues, quite literally, to 'grow outside'? These are questions that, in Fauna and Flora, Ponge summarises with a famous encapsulation: 'There is no way out of trees by means of trees.’ 5 However, while Ponge has his own rationale, poetic if not poietic, the 'tree medium' is far from unimportant. Elisabetta often uses ivy, as in Co-incide, a plant that is infesting yet promising, given its nature as a climber. Cut with a scalpel, following its veins, we find it in the rooms of her exhibitions and within her studio, in a conceptual continuity between external and internal, in a sort of plant tapestry or arabesque — 'And if there is one part of the plant that is particularly vital, destined to proliferate and become irregular […] it is the foliage.’ 6 This, in other words, is the effect of the indeterminate, indefinite or open embryogenesis of plants: 'They continue growing their entire lives, increasing in size and producing new organs: leaves, stems, roots […] The life of a plant is mingled with its growth.' 7 There is, then, a sharp contrast with the animal embryo, where growth is concentrated in the first phases of its existence; following birth, it grows only slightly and, having become an adult, retains that same structure intact. In the geometry of a leaf, in the ramification of its vascular tissue, in its radial co- ordinates, 8 Elisabetta glimpses cartographies — or plans — of cities. So here we have Paris, Mexico City, Fez, the Casbah of Algiers, all incised with a scalpel from Marseilles soap or wrapping tissue (Mapping the Air, 2020). Based on the same logic, the underground is not just a simple subterranean transport network but an organic structure, a living, breathing 'city cell'. And a river like the Seine, as proposed by the artist, seems to be a 'vein circuit' that flows through the city of Paris, dividing it into two banks that, in light of this organic image, appear less like the Rive Gauche and the Rive Droite and more like systole and diastole. On the walls of her studio (and sometimes, of the institutions where she is invited to exhibit her work), sited next to, or superimposed onto, the vegetal forms are city maps, facades of buildings, royal palaces, temples, squares with fountains, obelisks, triumphal arches, skyscrapers, the Rialto Bridge or the skyline of Manhattan. In this way, the arborescent roots are not reminiscent only of the crown of a tree — Aristotle referred to trees as inverted men — but also of synapses. Yet more correspondences, where 'everything is held aloft by the thinnest of wires', where everything is of 'a simple complexity'. Butterfly Following a cataract operation in the summer of 1975 in Berne, Paul Bereyter was lying in bed with his eyes blindfolded and found that 'he could see things with the 5 Ibid., p. 41. 6 Clélia Nau, Feuillages. L’art et les puissances du végétal (Paris: Hazan, 2021), p. 13. Editor’s translation. 7 Hallé, op. cit., p. 77. 8 See D’Arcy W. Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), especially Chapter XVII, 'On the theory of transformations, or the comparison of related forms', pp. 1026–1092. Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025 4 greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within him.' 9 Here, he receives a curious recommendation that his doctor says will help protect and improve his regained sight: he should lose himself in contemplation of leaves caressed by the wind. It is a congenial pastime for Bereyter, who has a passion for botany, natural sciences and outdoor observation sessions with his students. The cure for blindness is said to consist of prolonged viewing of plants, and while it may appear of limited scientific value, it does indeed succeed in slowing the physiological degradation of sight that comes with ageing, and which in Paul’s case eventually began in 1982. The deterioration of his sight is manifested with an equally singular image: Bereyter sees butterflies (papillons, in the French translation) twirling in front of him, thus confirming his blindness. These are the same 'little dark patches' and ‘pearl drop shapes before his eyes' from which he had suffered as a child; 10 the same coleoptera that he would get his students to study, stored in a glass cabinet on the wall. It is as if the recovery of his sight, thanks to the removal of the cataract, were just a parenthesis. Gradually, Bereyter can make out nothing but 'fragmented or shattered images'. 11 What comes to the fore is what he calls, all irony aside, the 'mouse-grey prospect', 12 which will soon lead him to kill himself. His medical arc thus spans two optical effects and two forms that spin in the air, the first vegetal (leaves), the second animal (butterflies). Their morphology is similar: small surfaces built on a bilateral symmetry and so thin as to be subject to the whims of the wind, to a rolling undulation that spellbinds the childhood gaze. Their meanings, however, are diametrically opposed: the former are associated with an improvement of sight more effective than any optical prosthesis, the latter with its irreversible deprivation. The former are part of the natural (and specifically, plant) world. At the same time, the latter are phosphenes, visual hallucinations caused by the loss of sight, by that syndrome which Charles Bonnet described in 1758 as a fluctuating of objects in the visual field: 'one time it was a swarm of specks that suddenly turned into a flight of pigeons, another time a group of dancing butterflies.' 13 'There is mist that no eye can dispel.' 14 So states the epigraph to Bereyter’s story as told by W.G. Sebald (as reported or perhaps imagined by him?) in The Emigrants (1993), a novel that tugs at the threads of memory, where it is often a question of blindness and ephemeral glances. Ambros Adelwarth 'was having constant trouble with his eyesight, and suffered from bad headaches, and so he often wore a green eyeshade.’ 15 Max Aurach’s drawings are the result of an incessant erasure, 'a steady production of dust, which never ceased except at night.’ 16 Admitted to Withington Hospital in Manchester and struggling to speak, Aurach’s attempts at speech 9 W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1996), p. 46. 10 Ibid, p. 54. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Quoted in Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2012), p. 23. 14 Sebald, op. cit., p. 29. 15 Ibid., p. 101. 16 Ibid., p. 135. Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025 5 'sounded like the rustle of dry leaves in the wind.’ 17 To say nothing of the butterfly man, an allegorical figure verging on madness, who tries to grab memories with his net as if they were butterflies, and who makes an appearance in various Sebald novels. 18 'A flying match, its flame is not contagious', 19 as Ponge defines the butterfly in Taking the Side of Things, the same poetry collection in which flowers become 'luminous, fragrant blisters' 20 and in which flower and butterfly are brought together, the latter being defined as a 'miniscule airborne sailboat abused by the wind mistaking it for a twice-spawned petal, it gallivants around the garden.’ In Bereyter’s case, however, just as leaves thrust open the world, so butterflies announce the imminent inability to see. Indeed, the colours are missing from the leaves, and paradoxically, such brightly coloured forms from the animal world should appear, only to flag up impending blindness. Yet it does make sense if we consider that certain butterflies, when they close their wings, resemble dry leaves. The camouflage of the butterfly-leaf — which fascinated Roger Caillois 21 — confuses predators, so just imagine what it does to people affected by clouding of the crystalline lens. Butterflies encapsulate better than any other creature the metamorphosis of living things. 'Veritable factory of colours', Primo Levi did not forget that they were once caterpillars, 'awkward, slow, stinging, voracious, hairy, dim-witted', 'symbol of the crude and the unfinished, of perfection unattained’, 22 before concluding: 'In the deeper layers of our consciousness, the butterfly with its agitated flight is a simple soul, a fairy, sometimes even a witch.’ 23 A part of Elisabetta’s work is suspended between leaves and butterflies; only now do I realise that, rather than constructing two distinct bodies of work, one is the flip-side of the other. Appropriately, then, in Annunciation (2025), a sculpture made of oxidised copper, I can see equally the wings of a dragonfly and a leaf, both images of that 'frangible' quality which permeates her work. Foliage The exercise of Bereyter’s gaze recalls, in many ways, the experience of those who view Elisabetta’s work, to the extent that a lengthy passage by the art historian Clélia Nau on Sebald’s story can offer an insightful commentary on it. Staring at a leaf which finds itself at the mercy of the wind and tracking its random flight path demands a vibrant spirit: 17 Ibid., p. 196. 18 See Muriel Pic, W.G. Sebald - L’image papillon (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2009), pp. 137–161. 19 Francis Ponge, 'Taking the Side of Things', in The Voice of Things, trans. Beth Archer (New York: McGraw-Hill: 1974), p. 47. 20 Ponge, op. cit., p. 65. 21 See Georges Didi-Huberman, 'Apparaissant, disparaissant, papillonnant' (2006), in Georges Didi- Huberman, Phalènes. Essais sur l’apparition, 2 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2013), pp. 9–78. 22 Primo Levi, 'Butterflies', in Ann Goldstein (ed.), The Complete Works of Primo Levi (New York: Liveright, 2105), pp. 1217–1218. 23 Ibid., p. 1218. Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025 6 a shape that constantly changes form, which only appears as such against the backdrop of a shapeless fringe, a blurred margin […] To combat the numbness of all activity in a diseased eye that gradually becomes opaque and threatens to darken, there is nothing better than forcing it to confront what, even at a short distance, tends to become blurred. Observing the leaves insistently, the eye naturally tends to defocus, to lose its focus, to lose concentration. To continue to see the contours, the curvature, the details of the leaves, to maintain lines and outlines with all one’s strength, requires increased attention and sustained, constant effort. The experience is painful, in that the subject is tested by the weakness of their own powers of perception. The strain on the eyes is unprecedented, in that the blur regains ground at the slightest relaxation. As soon as one abandons all effort, gives up scrutinising the object closely [...] as soon as the eye, far from projecting itself outward toward the object, targeting it, allows it to happen, to flow, to overflow, the foliage will be nothing more than a blur, an amorphous mass, resembling nothing that can be named, not even foliage: it will be a nameless nebula, a simple inarticulate rustling. 24 Fixing a vegetal form in place but not with pins, like a butterfly on an entomological cabinet or a plant in a herbarium. We are far from the hortus siccus, as herbaria were called in antiquity; Bereyter’s is a herbarium of living plants. Just as in Butterfly Flight Trajectory (2012), entomological pins are used to reconstruct the sinuous but well-defined pathway of a butterfly. Every material has its own vocation of form, so Elisabetta suggests to me over the course of a visit to her Venetian studio. Accordingly, she 'draws' not only on porcelain sheets but also on wax, on Marseilles soap, on glass, and even on leaves. And the leaves are never identical, to avoid the risk of the syndrome that afflicted the Borges character Ireneo Funes, who boasted of his ability to remember every leaf of every tree of every woodland, but also every face that he had seen or even just imagined. However, grasping the real in its most singular form, what could pass for a boundless bolstering of vision becomes a form of blindness because, lost in such chaos, the world and the language become incomprehensible and illegible. Elisabetta works the leaves when they are still soft, before they dry out and become as hard as paper, fixing them with an oily material such as glycerine. The process is different from that — hardly altered over the centuries — of the herbaria that affixes plants, leaves and flowers to paper; a leaf in contact with a sheet or, to use the pleasing definition of herbaria coined by the botanist Marc Jeanson, 'feuilles remisées entre deux feuilles' (leaves stored between two leaves). 25 However, in addition to an affinity with a number of (non-scientific) herbaria, starting with Emily Dickinson, several aspects are incompatible with her artistic practice. Her interest lies not in botanical properties or the encyclopaedic thrust towards classification that underpins the history of the herbarium, but in a play of correspondences that only the visual arts, rather than the sciences, can engage with. 24 Clélia Nau, Feuillages. L’art et les puissances du végétal (Paris: Hazan, 2021), pp. 119–120. Editor’s translation. 25 Marc Jeanson, Charlotte Fauve, Botaniste (Paris: Grasset, 2019), p. 8. Elisabetta Di Maggio, Frangible, GAM, November 2025 7 At times (Untitled, 2023), as well as stabilising leaves and incising them by hand with a scalpel, the artist draws the shadow that the leaf casts at a given time of day. In this way, the shadow becomes a drawing, a drawing of the shadow that confuses our perception at the moment in which it is superimposed onto the real shadow projected by the leaves. It creates temporal confusion because the shadow drawn by the artist refers back to the past, whereas the shadow cast by the light coincides with the very moment of observation. The former shadow is a trace of graphite; the latter, ephemeral, passes without leaving a trace. The former is on the sheet, like butterfly wings fixed with pins; the latter evolves with the passing of the day, depending on the meteorological and lighting conditions. The former represents memory, the latter the present, that of the viewer’s perception, like a sundial telling the time. ‘The true material of my work is time’, declares Di Maggio — a time that has the rhythm of a butterfly’s wings or a falling leaf.