The Swiss-Italian artist Piero Gilardi was born in 1942 and is now 79. When he was a young man, an encounter with Michelangelo Pistoletto was formative. It was the 1960s and Pop Art was ascendent in America. Pistoletto was making mirrors of stainless steel and glueing figures to them, hailing a new era of realism in Europe. Quietly, Gilardi began his own game of real versus fake, the utilitarian versus the useless. He created hyperrealist swaths of landscape—“carpets” made of polyurethane foam, carved and then saturated with pigment, that were like the skin of the earth (shoreline, meadow, forest floor). He named the series “Tappeto-Natura.” These were “aesthetic objects of practical use,” a new concept for the art world. This exhibition is dedicated to Gilardi and spotlights pieces from the series. —Elena Clavarino