The five portraits sculpted in acrylic resin and white marble dust are lined up along the course of one of the branches of the Livenza Morta Canal, on the edge of the agricultural estate of Ca’ Corniani.

Set on five large bases made of exactly the same material as the sculptures— and on which the caption is engraved— the white works shine brightly in the natural light of the sun, forming an enfilade of figures that extends at right angles to one of the cycle tracks through the area, after the bridge leading to Caorle.

The sculptures are faithful portraits of the horses and dogs owned by a farmer who lives and works on the estate today. Icy and almost classical in appearance, the animals watch over the countryside: they echo in their arrangement the rows of sculptures traditionally laid out in the grounds of 16th-century villas in the Veneto.

These figures of animals on the Threshold, silent custodians of the rural beauty that surrounds them, are on the one hand another monument to the present of Ca’ Corniani—the real animals that live there today, working for and belonging to the farmers, this land and its biological and productive life—and on the other an icon and manifesto of an approach, of a propensity to see cultivated nature as an aesthetic and cultural resource.

Farming is a garden of beauty and the animals that live in it are its guardians and its inhabitants.

The work speaks the language of the countryside and its community, producing an account and stimulating people to gossip in a positive way.

It portrays the reality of life and its truth. It moves “toward” its viewers, the inhabitants of the place and the people who visit it.

Through a subtle interplay of reflections and assonances between past and present, it appears as a new scene amidst the geometrical patterns of the cultivated fields. A classical and ambiguously disconcerting vision of white figures lined up in the meadows and along the watercourses of the area: a gallery of animal portraits set in the agricultural landscape of Ca’ Corniani.