edited by Luigi Borgo
THE TWELVE APOSTLES
A quick glance at the stars of ironmongery in the last hundred years must be given before starting to write about Gibo (Angelo Gilberto Perlotto): who are the seven or perhaps more artists who, using iron, have left their mark on contemporary art? Where does their iron-work place itself among the many poetics of our time? And then the iron, a material so ancient but also so emblematic of war, especially of World War I, and of in the industrial world, what significance did it take among the many, perhaps all, materials used by the artists of the twentieth century and of today?
Let’s take a quick look at the artists of the twentieth century who used iron significantly and repeatedly for their works: the Americans David Smith (1906- 1965) and Richard Serra (1938), the Spanish Julio Gonzales (1876-1942), the Swiss Jean Tinguely (1925-1991), the French Pierre Fernandez Arman (1928-2005), the English Antony Caro (1924-2013) and the Italian Ettore Colla (1896-1968), Berto Lardera (1911-1989), Toni Benetton ( 1910-1996), Pietro Consagra (1920-2005), Angelo Bozzola (1921-2010), Pino Castagna (1932-2017), Eliseo Mattiacci (1940). Original and isolated as they may have been in their artistic paths, almost everyone shared three reasons for choosing the iron: firstly, “the poetics of scrap”, that fragment of life abandoned as a testimony of a recent dramatic past: “my first encounter with scrap iron”, writes Ettore Colla, “occurred immediately after the war, in the places where it was fought … I found myself facing the dramatic and fascinating spectacle of torn, twisted, tangled materials, … a buried and disintegrated world open to the coldest truth … “; secondly, iron is a “poor and free choice”, in opposition to the expensive and rhetorical marble, overloaded with that history, accused by Nietzsche, in his Second Untimely Meditation, of being a useless weight and a constrictive, blackmailing and jeropardising force on the free and creative new man; thirdly, “the choice of material ” as it is lowered in the depth of authenticity and truth: precisely in that “material” that is felt as “mater” of the world. And with iron they produced works that can now be ascribed to the canon of abstract geometry, like the large imaginative machines, symbols of the age of the machine, or, like in the case of Richard Serra installations of large geometric structures or, like Benetton, Bozzola and Castagna, of monumental environmental sculptures; or like the canon of informal art, with works that evoke vaguely anthropomorphic figures. In all cases, however, in the Italian twentieth-century quarrel between the abstract and the figurative, iron artists can unequivocally be ascribed to abstract art.
This is the first point: twentieth-century iron art that Gibo sees in exhibitions and studies in catalogs is abstract art. Iron Pleiades emit that precise type of suggestion.
If this is what happens “outside”, in the art world, well codified by its famous and functioning “System”, there is also a familiar sky, “nostrum”, of iron artists, with other bright and important stars around in Gibo: his great-grandfather Antonio Lora (1835-1922), his grandfather Angelo Perlotto (1884-1962), his uncle Tito (1918-2008) and his father Germano (1928-1991). A dynasty of blacksmiths long over a century, to which Gibo feels very strongly to belong. He knows, as he says, that he has “that same demon inside”. On several occasions he reiterated his pride in following up Perlotto’s art, without hiding the effort and responsibility to continue an important story begun by others so long ago.
Infact that of the Lora-Perlotto is one of the stories of the most significant iron masters of Italy, begun in the workshop of Antonio in the lower Trissino, continued in Angelo’s laboratory, which later became Germano’s and which today belongs to Gibo, and in that of Tito, in the upper city in front of the monumental entrance of Villa Trissino-Marzotto built by Francesco Muttoni, with the majestic eighteenth-century gate by Girolamo Frigimelica.
Among the innumerable works by Antonio Lora we must remember: the great Grifo (the big Griffin), made between 1870 and 1872; the funerary chapel of Antonio Tomba, the man coming form Valdagno who made his fortune in Argentina and who, falling ill, wanted to return to his home town to be buried there, but having died during the Atlantic crossing, only his heart was placed in the iron and bronze chapel that Antonio had realized for him; and then the great iron and copper Archangel of the bell tower of Trissino, 7.15 meters high, with a wingspan of 3.60 meters, built in 1903 with the function of an anemometer. Also the relevant forged figures of Villa Rossato at Cornedo in 1928 were realised by Angelo; the gate inside the Duomo of Valdagno of 1930, completed with decorations of flowers and large leaves; the chiseled iron and silver works of the grotto of Lourdes di Chiampo and Zimella. By Tito, on the other hand, the railings of the 1960s inscribed with the profiles of animals of the forest, the finely chiselled embossed copper baptisters present in various churches in the Veneto (Monteviale, Gambellara, Negrar, Alte Ceccato …), the majestic bronze portal of the church of the Maglio di Sopra of Valdagno of 2001.
Also the realization of the great protection railings of the various branches of the Banca Popolare di Vicenza, (Trissino, Cornedo, Vicenza) and the iron works of sacred art that adorn the churches of Trissino, Castelfranco Veneto, Montorso are by Germano.
Antonio’s art is chiseling: his works are massive but light; the fantastic figures he reproduces, like the Grifo, seem to be caught in the act of moving. Indeed the Archangel, being an anemometer, actually moves. They are works attributable to the magical realism of the early twentieth century for the technical perfection with which he makes his dream visions credible and convincing. Angelo’s art is forging: iron bent in the fire. His works are strong, ornate, rich, massive, while Tito’s art is the design and the accuracy of the beating: his works have an exemplary linearity and cleanliness that we also find as a distinctive trait of Germano’s works.
This is the second point to keep in mind. Gibo is born among important blacksmiths-artists. In addition, he restored of the above mentioned works by Antonio Lora, that is: the Grifo, the Tomba Chapel and the Archangel of Trissino. The iron of the Lora Perlottos is not only around him in the spaces and in the inherited utensils, but becomes part of him, because Gibo literally enters it, as in the case of the great Archangel, which can welcome a man inside. These are restorations that last for years for the size and complexity of the works. Who engage him in a punctual reconstruction of many pieces irremediably corroded by time. He writes: “the realization of these restorations allowed me to touch with my hand and feel extraordinary emotions with the heart. He taught me to recognize the thin line between know-how and art. The works of my great-grandfather Antonio transmit the vital energy of the Artist who produced them “.
Thus Gibo’s iron world has these two distinct “skies”: that of studies and research on the contemporary that lead it to know the “abstract” possibilities of iron and that of belonging to an ancient family of blacksmiths; that is on the one hand Gibo acquires the new languages of the iron art, on the other it makes the descent into the deep, through the restoration of his great-grandfather’s works, through the daily use of those spaces in which his grandfather before and then his father forged. Abstract art and magical realism; proto or post industrial machineries and mythological griffins; anthropomorphic figures and archangels; installations of geometric structures and gates, baptismal chapels, funerary monuments with floral motifs: Gibo’s world is the whole world of iron.
Gibo had the artistic strength to mark a path and a new, powerful and necessary speech. With the defined character, proper of the true artist. It has been written that his works belong to the hyperrealist genre. Hyperrealism was an artistic movement in vogue in the United States at the turn of the 60s and 70s, centred on the challenge between painting and photography in the objective representation of reality. The hyperrealistic artists wanted to show that the human eye can catch just the same details as the photographic lens; that man can equal the machine. Also in sculpture, hyperrealism has had a certain follow-up with the production of very accurate copies worthy of a “wax museum”. Think of artists like Duane Hanson and John De Andrea who represented the America of fast-food goers, cops on the corner, tourists of the “all-inclusive” through perfect three-dimensional reproductions.
But Gibo’s hyperrealism is still something different: it does not arise from a photo projected on canvas so it can be painted, nor from a three-dimensional development of the photo because it becomes sculpture. In other words, Gibo does not use other materials than iron. In other words, in the hyperrealistic sculptures Moreover, Gibo does not use other materials than iron. In the hyperrealistic sculptures the silhouette was dressed with everyday clothes to complete it. The art used what was originally not art. This does not happen in Gibo. It is always the iron that becomes the man’s eye other material. We should therefore change the name of the canon of Gibo’s works into “pure hyper-realism”, where there is no counterpart to the origin of the artwork that serves as a model. The sculpture is born from a sketch on paper, then from an idea, from an intuition of the artist who has the imaginative and constructive power to create such a perfect sculpture to be confusable for that given object that we already know, of which however, there is no copy in reality. When we see the “carèga de paja” (the “straw chair” in Venetian dialect), we immediately recognize it, but that “carèga de paja” is made of iron and there is no “carèga de paja” that can be defined as a copy of the iron one, because this originates from Gibo’s mind and we recognize it only because it already exists in our memory.
Gibo seems to want, through his sculptures, to draw from our memory what we are forgetting: the tabàro (tabard in Venetian dialect) and the sgàlmare (in Venetian dialect: a pair of old footwear with leather upper and wooden sole used by poor people); the hat and the umbrella; the carèga (old chair) and the mònega (in Venetian dialect, an old tool used to heat the bed); the sling and the bigòlo (in Venetian dialect: arched tool used for shoulder transport of large baskets); the wicker wine bottle, the bowl and the tajapàn (in Venetian dialect: tool used for cutting hard bread); eggs and salami slice; the old and battered guitar … objects with a dialectal name, belonging to the peasant world of Veneto that no longer exists. Replaced by this bovine modernity.
“Dic nobis Maria: quid vidisti in vita? / (Tell us, Maria: what did you see in your life?) I have seen to triumph whore things, to marginalize the true ones”. (Zanzotto, La Pasqua in Pieve di Soligo). The “dialectal” objects of Gibo echo the poems of Zanzotto. They are words-objects of resistance in the struggle against a modernity that flattens everything; poems and sculptures of rebellion against a present, already defined “liquid”, which does not know how to express solid and lasting values. In dialect and in its objects there are still tiny presences of our original creative potentialities. The “carèga de paja” (straw chair) by Gibo tells the end of a world, its culture and its rituals, the anthropological transformation that we have all undergone, but it also reminds us of the values of our history through which we can still save ourselves.
However, this is not a simple re-evocation of a poor but authentic past that we have lost. Certainly there is also a bit of nostalgia, especially if we grasp that narrative vocation that his works still have: “the dusty tabard of pride with the folds of pain to hide in silence; the exhaustion chair at the end of the day; the old poor shoes for the resigned walk of misery, the suitcase with the tears of the emigrants … “, as Bepi De Marzi wrote; a narrative that becomes even more marked in the works composed of several elements: the book wrapped in barbed wire, for example, evokes directly the suffering of the war lived on the mountains of its land, but the artistic argument of Gibo goes much further.
His pure hyperrealism if it is “dialectal”, or “primitive”, in the choice of “topics” and in the “will to say”, to use the Dante expression, it is very actual and “global” in denouncing and rejecting the ahistorical superficiality of our present.
(When Zanzotto was heard talking, one was struck by his strong Venetian accent; when Gibo speaks about art, he always does it using dialect. Because, it seems to be the thought implied by both, dialect is not the language of political palaces, of the academy, of the courts, of the newspapers, of the churches, neither in dialect you can write emails or text messages, nor make friends on Facebook or communicate on Instagram. Dialect is another language: it is their/our secret language of the True, and therefore, of poetry and art).
With the “books”, which also belong to an ancient world, but not a rural one, Gibo further strengthens its cry of denunciation. In fact, if the great challenge of technological contemporaneity is that of the blacksmith against 3D programmers. Each of the books that make up “The Twelve Apostles” are perfect “cinquecentine” (precious books printed in the sixteenth century) without equivalent in parchment. Those who observe them are deceived. He picks them up and only then, due to their heaviness, he realizes that they are iron works. But the deception took place. As had also happened with the “straw chair”, with the “jacket”, with the “small pan with eggs”. Surprisingly, Gibo exposes us to whip his hard blow. How is it possible not to be able to recognize a book that is not paper? “How “stupid” are you?” Friends would ask you at the zanzottian “Snack bar al Canton”. How ignorant are you? Here is the severe and tragic accusation: we have seen everything on the screens of our computers, but we can no longer distinguish paper from iron.
This is exactly the measure of knowledge today. We immediately and arrogantly recognize what it is and we say its name, to realize that we do not even know more correctly to name the things that we thought we knew. At this point the book can remain closed, because obviously we no longer know how to read, intus legere, and the book is in fact closed. Gibo’s books are symbols of not knowing about our time. Those that originate from the Internet, where we can be educated about everything, without knowing anything, where friendships, even loves, exist between people who have never touched. We believe we know but what we know is only deception. The man at the time of the web saw everything, but he knows less about the reality than man when he was a farmer: this is what Gibo tells us.
However, he adds that it is not man who has changed. Man is always the same, he always has the same curiosity for art, for science, for life; he always has infinite passions that animate him. The world has changed. The world has become first technological and then web. In the near future we will all be Google citizens provisionally domiciled in some corner of the Planet. The world is no longer the rural one of the past; not even the industrial one of yesterday, not even the terrestrial one of today.
The world has changed, man has not. Man today experiences the same curiosity, wonder and emotion for the iron book by Gibo that, millennia ago, lived in front of the sea, near the fire, under the starry sky. It is not man who is changed, it is the world that is no longer the same.
Faced with our ignorance, Gibo invites us to awaken and recognize, socratically, that we do not know.
Then after a first moment of amazement at having confused an iron book for a “cinquecentina” (precious book printed in the XVI century) and a second moment in which Gibo / Socrates reveals us before the false knowledge of our times, there is a third, definitive and edifying: the iron book becomes in the hands an ingot, gold, for the completion of jewels in the form of thoughts. From that material, from the art that calls art, it is up to us to form words that will become thoughts. If this happens, they will be words and thoughts of salvation. And evangelization will still be.