Artist: Michele Gabriele
Exhibition title: Clumsy and Milky: encoding the last quarter of a pose
Curated by: Something Must Break
Venue: White Noise Gallery, Rome, Italy
Date: June 7 – July 30, 2018
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and White Noise Gallery, Rome
How does contemporary art react towards the revolution of communication languages and the new digital etiquette? This question is the cornerstone of “Clumsy and Milky: encoding the last quarter of a pose”. The exhibition is the first solo of Michele Gabriele in Rome; it will open the 7th of June at White Noise Gallery’s new location in via della Seggiola 9.
The show of the Milan-based artist will feature a new body of work curated by Something Must Break project. Michele Gabriele’s sculptures are archaeological artefacts from a yet-to-come future; semi-organic evolutions of daily use objects. Ready-mades from a dystopian future giving up any connection with their past. These artefacts are floating in an undefined narration instead of telling the story of their time.
Any reference to the artist disappears from the works, as if they were the product of a natural, chaos-based, transfiguration. The artworks look like the encounter of a geode, an old machinery from a garbage island and a limestone stalagmite.
All the works are constantly striking a pose, obsessed by the urgency of always showing their best selfie–face. They exist only to be seen at their best, as if they were models/avatar who only look real through an Instagram filter.
Each sculpture has been conceived in order to always show a three-quarter view; multi-faceted solids that are always showing an intriguing view regardless of the observation point. The result is a group of glossy artworks, smiling and blinking like beauty pageant queens.
The relationship among the viewer and the sculpture becomes similar to the one between a teen star and a demanding fan. While the viewer is obsessed by an idealized idea of the work, the latter is quickly reacting, trying to never fail in meeting its expectation.
***
I tried to show you the best parts of me, the most edgy, composed, winking and generous of futile details, and I turned my silhouette into its own artifact orthogonal essence. Three plans, three quarters, simultaneously. Fractionated segments, carefully selected to make sure you will look at me.
I hoped I could show you only the good, the best, like through a pleasant profile picture, in which I am the image of your admiration, the contemplation of a perfectly-accomplished connotation inside the space of a narrow geometry.
I’m like you imagined. The protruding cheekbones, the winking curves drawn by the compass and concluding in the squared jaw, the edgy nose when viewed from above, the languid and transparent glance, the newborn’s nothing-patinated colored eyes. The torso slightly turned, a tuft of hair turned between the fingers.
You said you loved me, and now you are disappointed, your heart is broken.
It ‘s true, they are not as you thought, they are not at all orthogonal, nor appropriately squared. I’m so clumsy, and you’re so beautiful. I wanted to please you, for a moment, a very short time, before everything ended, before disappointing you and then I quickly hid all the rest, so ungainly, milky and inhomogeneous, the last plane of that axonometry that is the pose of a form staggering. But I never lied to you, never. I just wanted to see you speak again of me so proud, openly, and feel connected to me, to the clumsy sensuality that I could not hide between my back and shoulder. Accept me … I’m what you wanted …
(SomethingMustBreak)
