The Tarot Garden in Capalbio: the game and the life

No, it is not a piece of Barcelona, transported, we don’t know how, in Maremma, even if we may have the feeling to be really surrounded by the fascinating atmospheres of the Guell park, realized by the great genius of Gaudì. To tell the true, an artist’s touch, exists. Of an important artist in the bargain, the French Niki de Saint Phalle, whose works already stood out in cities as Berlin, Paris, Jerusalem.

As other artists, Niki had a dream: to realize a site with an esoteric flavour, out of time and space, inspired by the Tarots, the cards from time immemoral used to predict the future and fate. A magical site, then, an enchanted garden were to wonderm through the art, about the mystery of existence, the game often cruel of life, in which everyone, without exception, is obliged to play one’s game. And where to realize such project elsewhere than in Tuscany, in a land where the brackish flavour of an ancient and mythical sea washes a coast with the marks left by the Etruscans? Just here that dream could become reality, thanks to a friend that prevails her brothers to offer a plot of ground.

Niki de Saint Phalle works with great enthusiasm, with other artists, to the constructione of the twenty-two gigantic sculptures, high from fifteen to twenty-two meters and inspired by the Major Arcanes. Sculptures realized in reinforced concrete and and coated with the same material utilized by Gaudì in Barcelona. Because of her entusiasm, she create her home in the inner of one of the statues, the one representing the Empress. So, she was not obliged to leave the garden, even for an instant. In conclusion, a really difficult project to which, Niki will work from 1979 until 1996. The Tarot Garden is surrounded by an high tuff wall in which a particular ticket office realized by the architect Mario Botta is inserted. A barrier the divides two spaces apparently incompatible each another, In fact, the garden is an entity apart. To cross the threshold means to leave our own world and certitudes behind us.

The artist has recently died, immediately after the ralization of her project, the dream of an entire life. The great sculptures are survived to testify about that mixture of mystery and madness that constitutes the human life. About that game in which nobody is, in the end, the winner. In the garden there are no guides or defined courses. So was the will of Niki de Saint Phalle, because all, in life, is in the hands of the fate, as the cards in the deck of the Tarots. Her the brush dominates everywhere and hides our way. So we go blindly and with no idea about what we will find ahead of us. Perhaps the High Priestess, the Tower of Babel or the Hermit? Or the complicated structure of the Emperor with its mosaics that shine in the sun? Or, maybe, the profile of the Justice simbolized by a feminine body that include in the inner the injustice machine, closed by an insurmountable gate?

Suddendly, however, we see the figure of the Empress that recalls rather that of a sphinx. Inside this statue, as we have alredy said, the artist lived: in the innner there is a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room we visit a little disconcerted. Not far from here we meet the Pope, the Magician, the Chariot, the Star, the Temperance Chapel. All seems created to disorientate, with a succession that results always unpredictable and perplexing. In the same way as the more disquieting presences: the Tree of Life with the Hanged Man, the Madman, even the Death on her mount. Many frameworks are situated around the great fountain with the Wheel of Fortune of Jean Tinguely

What became of the sweet and relaxing Tuscan landscape we left behind us? Here we are in an hallucinated world, made still more unreal because of the extremely coloured and shining surfaces of the constructions. Perhaps we entered, we don’t remember, as tourists waiting amusement. But at the moment we are wandering, as lost, in alien world, with no certainty, with no references. With our eyes full of colours and light, in this mad and undefined world where the figures break up, interpenetrate, contain other figures. A mad world, with no rules. Such as the Tarots, such as our absurd life.