"And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed." (Genesis 2:8)

At the beginning there is a gardener god and an ideal place. The garden is not nature but its disciplined image. The word itself says so. Paradise comes from the old Iranian pairidaeza, the wall that runs around: a space is fenced off to guard an idea of happiness, and it is called 

Eden, which Hebrew tradition ties to delight. But it is a delight we know only because we lost it. For three thousand years the literature of the garden has told the same story: to remake by hand a paradise that is gone.

It is an art Tuscia knows better than most: from the water geometries of Villa Lante to the box labyrinths of Caprarola, to the Italian garden of Villa Savorelli, here in Sutri, where beside the garden a sacred wood has survived for centuries. It is in this land that Italy made the garden a genre of its own.

Here, today, Gregor Becker works. At the root of his work lies a German word, Heimat: the place where you grow up and where your roots are. "Once you lose it, the pull of it stays in you, but it is never the same again, not even if you go back." His works do not try to return to that place: they rebuild it, tile by tile. In his pictures nature is not a backdrop, it is the space where a person takes part in creation: the second creation, the one left to human hands.

From the garden he keeps the method. What he cultivates is not a plant but the light: the first creature. For him light is not only an optical event, it is an organism that lives in its own happening and dies in its own capture. "I did not want to set the light in concrete inside a picture. Light is alive: it passes, it changes, it puts you in touch with everything around you."

He treats the immaterial as one treats a field. He takes what happens in a flash and forces it into the garden's time, into the seasons, into waiting. He does not paint the light, he sows it.

Like any harvest, the work ripens in the gaze, and outside that gaze it does not exist. "These works exist only when you are present. Take all the photographs you like: nothing happens. The thing happens when you are there, in front of it."