Sat 4 Feb 2023 to Sat 25 Mar 2023
4, passage Sainte-Avoye, 75003 Giuseppe Gabellone
Tue-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-7pm
Artist: Giuseppe Gabellone
Acrylic paint, acrylic resin, fiberglass, aluminum frame
2955 × 2080 mm
Courtesy the artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo: Claire Dorn
Acrylic paint, acrylic resin, fiberglass, aluminum frame
1510 × 1925 mm
Courtesy the artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo: Claire Dorn
Framed digital print
210 × 315 mm
Edition of 3 plus I AP Courtesy the artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole
Polyester resin, fiberglass, wood, fabrics
1150 × 980 × 7000 mm
Courtesy the artist and Art : Concept, Paris. Photo: Aurélien Mole
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In his recent essay, Jacques Rancière (1) analyzing landscape in the seventeenth quotes Kant, who approached landscape art not to « l’art de la vérité sensible » such as architecture or sculpture, but to “l’art de l’apparence sensible” like painting. This “revolutionary” position of the gaze shows us how the garden, developed in a three-dimensional context, finds its aesthetic dimension in appearance. This dimension is found in the works gathered in the new exhibition by GG. Four elements are expanding in the space, always seeking a particular gaze that intent to generate a landscape.
Two bas-reliefs, made through a meticulous technique with acrylic paint, resin, and fiberglass, show forms that intertwine with each other building a relationship between the visible and the non-visible. This dialogue between elements creates a structure of planes by developing a sense of depth. A certain idea of landscape is defined by a forest of elements that emerge and sink into the dense structure of the material. As in a landscape, the dominant color is formed by an innumerable series of small dots. In fact, approaching the work we discover an intense color structure formed by small drops that render a particular atmospheric sense. The generic color is in fact the sum of a manifold combination of chromatic dots. The appearance of the color stands out that of the form that is developed on the same canon. Forms appear from a series of erasures and reformulations of the images we perceive. Implicitly the forms we see give rise to others that are behind it. The layering of form and color are the classical components of landscape structure. In the larger bas-relief titled Seguaci del Verdeazzurro (‘Followers of the Verdeazzurro’), a series of elements at varying scales also bring the gravity of the elements into play. One-cent coins are held by ropes defying the laws of physics. A frontal gaze is being dictated by the stiacciato technique (2) that makes the sculpture’s minimal reliefs close to the drawing. An implicit distance is generated by this gaze. By getting closer we “enter” in the landscape, we can perceive a series of elements invisible at a distance.
The exhibition space is split in two parts by a long volume of seven meters and a little more than one meter high. Il pomeriggio sulla schiena (‘The afternoon on the back’) carries on a fabric of an intense orange color. Gabellone presents us with a glimpse of light reflected on a wall. An almost metaphysical appearance that reduces a portion of the landscape to a few precise instructions. As in the bas-reliefs, the artist manages to concentrate a complex situation like a landscape through an essential grammar.
The smallest work, but which could be used as a key to understanding the whole exhibition, is a photograph of an anonymous sculpture with a smiling face, found by the artist and then photographed in his studio. Despite its generic status as a classical garden statue, its gaze arouses the curiosity by activating the idea of landscape that exists only in the condition of being looked at. This gaze generates a process of landscape synthesis that Gabellone accomplishes by trying to find a balance in an environment that unfolds between sculpture, painting and architecture.
—Lorenzo Benedetti, 2023
(1) Jacques Rancière, Le temps du paysage, Aux origines de la révolution esthétique, La fabrique éditions, 2020
(2) The flattened relief or stiacciato (from the Italian schiacciato, “crushed”), is a term that designates a sculptural technique situated between the flattened relief and the bas-relief allowing to realize on a flat surface a relief of very small thickness obeying the rules of the representation of the perspective.