Mirko Baselgia - artist from Visarte Graubünden on Vimeo.

Mirko Baselgia‘s work is inconceivable without the concrete living space around him - and this is here and there.

Mirko Baselgia says that he would prefer to be like a tree in his artistic work. Nothing about a tree is made of material that is superfluous, that harms the environment. Rather, everything the tree offers is useful - especially the wood. In this respect: Who would want to oppose the thesis that the tree is the king of all living beings? Possibly the giant rock that in truth unites so much life on and in itself, because it is grasped by its honour. Baselgia has just smilingly answered the question of whether he would rather take stones or wood with him to the desert island: Wood, stone would definitely already be there.

If wood is crowned for the moment, stone is far from being the entourage. For his series of paintings „unfolding“, Baselgia collected various rocks - prasinite, epidote, garnet amphibolite, radiolarite, granite, limestone and many others, some of which have not yet been specified - in valleys, rivers and on mountain slopes within a 20-kilometre radius of his studio in Alvaschein, GR, and then ground them up. Different coloured pigments were obtained in this way, which the artist then blew peu à peu onto previously folded linen with a Mouth Atomizer. But if the stretcher that stretches the linen is made of wood from a larch in the forest next door, the hand-woven linen comes from the Val Müstair - and thus from too far away: because Baselgia wants close! Which in turn does not mean that such an image of a landscape cannot be created elsewhere: If the Berlin Tiergarten were his environment, Mirko Baselgia would use wood and stones from there.

Markus Wanderl