edited by Luigi Borgo
Only isolated people communicate, Eugenio Montale
With the Crevices, large iron plates ridged each with its own telluric trend, we enter the deepest core of the now forty-year long artistic research of Gibo Perlotto, in what is considered the most revealing moment of his art. Almost as if the Crevices were, despite the initial difficulty of interpretation that Gibo’s other hyperrealist art-works lack, the most effective key to understand his artistic thought, his “poetics”, the motive of all his work. In this sense, the Crevices are not the point of arrival of the Gibian art, but the central and revealing moment of his long artistic militancy.
It is initially understood starting from a temporary fact: the first Crevice dates back to 2008. In that year he is at the apex of his pure hyperrealism. Many of his most important pieces in the cycle of Countryside Memory- the Vegetable Garden, the Chairs and the Books- have already been realized. In the decade spanning from 2008 to today, Gibo will forge a dozen Crevices. More than one a year. Each of them with its own special “fracture”. For ten years, however, the Crevices will remain a secret. Gibo does not show them to his collectors, he does not exhibit them in the various shows where he participates, nor subject them to the judgment of his critics and the public. The Crevices remain locked in his workshop, mysterious and intimate objects, involuntary intrusions that impose themselves.
Thus, in parallel with the production of works representing his cardinal value as an artist- namely the Chairs, the Vegetable Garden, the works of the Countryside Memory Cycle, the Painting Easels, the Metal-morphoses, the Books, all sculptures strictly belonging to the hyperrealist canon- Gibo realizes the Crevices in an original cohabitation and, at first glance, even a misleading way from his artistic and stylistic discourse: the former are immediate and extremely rational; the latter, arcane and unconscious.
It would seem a contradiction, a conflicting moment in the artistic creation of Gibo, almost an attempt to reject the hyper-realistic canon, but it is not. Because the Crevices are not an attempt to overcome the representation of the real, an escape from mimicry in abstraction and its metaphysical possibilities, in search of a more marked transcendence, but, on the contrary, they are a radicalization of the figurative power of the hyperrealist canon. Crevices are crevices. Real cracks, absolutely cracks.
In other words, quite similar to those seen on the walls of abandoned houses in abandoned counties. They are representations, of those crevices that threaten the walls of houses and stables in rural Veneto. If you could expand the vision of these cracks with a reverse zoom effect, you would see the wall and its windows and then again the roof and then, further widening the visual field, the county, the village and the landscape all the way to that community residing there.
The crevice is then the sign, the wound, the denunciation of the absence of that care for houses and things, for nature and its places: woods, fields, water beds, which, in the time of farming civilization as in the ancient myth of Cura up to the Heideggerian meaning of “cure”. It meant that from the earth life was born, from the soil came man and from chaos the cosmos.
That cosmos which was so emblematic of the children of the earth, rich in strength and lyricism, poetry and faith, traditions and knowledge, but also replete with toils and sacrifices, honesty and simplicity, solidity and reality. Today that cosmos has been brutally swept away by the neo-digital terrestrial stupidity, for which speed is preferred to depth. Emotions are preferred to feelings, information to knowledge, chats to meetings, the immediate to the long-lasting; a farming world erased by a thousand repairs of cracks, real and symbolic, with tiles of glued exotic stones or with fluorescent yellow-orange plasters on houses, on whose doors the name Anthony and his surname are written, in honor of the grandfather Toni who built the house.
Gibo’s Crevices tell us so. With the Books, the Chairs and the Vegetable Garden, they reaffirm the gibian challenge of all time: the one between iron and pixel, the one between the faber man, son of the earth, and the digital man, son of algorithms.
Gibo has not changed his view of the world at all, nor has he changed his artistic language. Indeed he has strengthened both with the Crevices. In the artist’s knowledge of this radicalization of his discourse on the present we find the reason for witholding the Crevices that for more than a decade he has been forging.
In fact if with the works of the Vegetable Garden, with the Chairs, with the Books, generally with all his artistic production, Gibo raised a song of praise to that culture and to that work of the earth from which we came and of which, according to him, we should never forget we belong, at least a little, to recognize ourselves as men, with the Crevices he goes directly to represent the cracks in the walls of the houses of rural Veneto, which testify to the unequivocal threat of collapse of a world and of his idea of man.
From praise to cry. To achieve this transition, Gibo finds new formal essentiality. In them every narrative fails. Every impulse to prove his special ability to forge iron is controlled. Crevices are only cracks in the iron. Without any addition. Without any decoration. All of the Crevice is in that “sign”, in that “gesture” and in the reflections that it realizes in the iron “material”. “Sign”, “gesture”, “material” are the key words of the European ‘Informale” of the Fifties. Evidently Gibo here declares his profound affinity with the lesson of the masters of the Italian ‘Informale’. The “gesture” of Fontana’s “Cuts”, the “material” of Burri’s “Cretti”, the “magmatism” of Pomodoro’s Crevices are present and very recognizable aspects in Gibo’s Crevices. And this happens in complete harmony with the other lesson, the dynastic one of the Lora-Perlotto, that of the art of wrought iron and chiselled with one’s own hands up to its intimate perfection. With the Crevices, Gibo combines his art masters with his masters of iron, and manages to do it by continuing, even strengthening, his very personal hyperrealism.
This is why the Crevices are the most revealing moment of his poetry. True declarations of his artistic self; that’s why for ten years Gibo has had intimate fear and modesty of them.
There is a neologism of Joyce that tries to tell us what a work of art is. It is “chaosmos”. “Chaos” and “cosmos” joined together. Art as a continuous search for small, temporary cosmic spaces in the infinite and eternal chaos of the whole. Art as a challenge, therefore, to the human condition as expressed in the epistle of Paul to the Corinthians: “We know imperfectly and imperfectly we prophetyze” (13, 8-13). With Crevices, Gibo raised the question of “why”, of the “ultimate meaning” of his art more than in other works. Leonard Bernstein said that, sooner or later, an artist always comes to ask those questions that have no answer. To the question “what is music?” Bernstein replied: “tonal”. To the question “what is art?” Gibo replies: “realism”, as an authentic tale of the shape of the world.