edited by Luigi Borgo
The thirty-year-long artistic research of Gibo has essentially unraveled within large thematic cycles: that’s beacuse Gibo immediately found its special stylistic code in the canon of hyperrealism, bringing to it his own original contribution: that “purity”, because every work is not a copy, but an invention of an object that can only be ascribed to the real world but does not belong to it. Each work is made of a single material, iron, which in turn takes on other appearances on its own.
This formal absoluteness and this uniqueness in the material choice for his work allows Gibo’s artistic story to have its most significant variations and tensions in the chosen topics, so its “narration” can only take place through them. This is a minority critical perspective in the art history of the last hundred years, in which the dynamics of shape in the pluralty of materials adopted by the various artists have been dominant.
Furthermore, the artistic canon of hyperrealism, more than any other, has a clear aesthetic purpose: the most total resemblance to reality to the point of replacing it titanically, overwhelming it. It follows then that the hyper-realistic work, in its clear tension to be more real than the real, has a clearly verifiable outcome, being again in an exceptional position with respect to any other artistic canon. This outcome is not debatable. Either it has the imprint of the real to the point of confusing us or it is a failure.
Therefore accuracy, which is the second moment of the artistic process- the first being inspiration- is a given feature of hyper-realistic poetics, where material, in the case of Gibo the “dynastic” iron, must be unrecognizable as such.
A new page could be opened here on this ancestral iron – for more than a hundred years and for four generations the Lora-Perlotto family, of which Gibo is a direct descendant, have been iron artists, utilising this material every time with different formal canons. A page of psychological criticism. In Gibo’s hyper-realistic vocation to use iron in such a way that it is no longer recognizable as iron, one could detect his desire, if not to “kill” his history, to create a gap, almost a libertarian escape… so that the next Perlotto artist can use, without family scandal, any material … But this is only speculation.
In the formal completeness and in the monastic choice of materials, a psychological interpretation of Gibo’s choices centered on the eternal, and by now banal rebellion from ancestral blood, says little, and so does a formal-structuralist reading of his creations: the use of 120 meters of iron rod with a thickness of 5, 6, sometimes even 8 mm, hand-woven in countless times to create the seat of the chair is a curiosity, more than a meaningful choice. It is true, instead, that in the metamorphosis from iron to wood, straw (le carèghe) … paper, gut casing, velvet (the books) … in eggs, salami, tabard, sgàlmare (old shoes worn by poor people, the countryside memory) … in tomatoes, cabbage, asparagus, grapes (the vegetable garden) … paint brushes, tubes, color (the art easels) … in any material, in all the material … Gibo lives and lets live those who admire his artwork, the essence of art, its power and transformative magic: from a sign a sense is born, from an image, a new emotion for our “benefit” – to use David Maria Turoldo’s words – that is for our joy.
So why does Gibo adopt the hyperrealist canon for the very first time in the crowded panorama of iron sculptors? In my opinion, all the artistic currents are always second to an “epochal” historical event, which have been the “incubators” of the aesthetic-formal-intellectual development. To clarify: first comes the age of the great Lordships with their businesses and their new economic strength; then comes the great art of Renaissance, which became the aesthetic canon and the object of praise and criticism of that world; first comes the Counter Reformation then the Baroque Art; first comes the Cosmological Revolution then the Enlightenment; first the Industrial Revolution then the Romanticism, first the World Wars then the Existentialism …
Gibo’s hyper-realistic choice dates back to the 1980s, at the dawn of that “strong” upheaval in our Age of Technique with the beginning of what we might call the Web Side Story. The computer and its applications have put into question the hyperrealist current, born in the Seventies with the spread of photography, the other machine. Gibo is the first and currently still the only sculptor of iron to produce hyper-realistic art, recognizing, in the iron-versus-pixel challenge, the exact representation of reality, the most penetrating and disruptive language to express one’s free, critical, artistic, salvific, and even “useful and jovial” discourse on contemporary art. Therefore the themes are what shapes the chapters of Gibo’s history.
History of meanings and not of signifiers. And the themes are the book, the vegetable garden, the countryside memory, the metal-morphoses, the still life, the painting easels. Each theme is a moment of his special sensitivity as a man and artist in the unstable age of the cloud.
The theme of the chairs in particular, the richest one in terms of art pieces, is central to his research, as the same Gibo, always vigilant about his communicative intentions, reveals to us in his writing. Before leaving the word to him, an introduction must be made.
Most of Gibo’s themes, including our Carèghe, belong to the rural-natural world of that Venetian province from which Gibo originates. Franco Fortini, speaking of Zanzotto, another Venetian artist strongly inspired by the landscape of his land, wrote that this naturalistic thematic dominance can be explained by the fact that in the province nature “frees itself” more easily than in the city: society is “immobilized”, especially in the Veneto region. The Venetian nature, Fortini points out from an exogenous perspective, is more vital than the Venetian society.
Ferdinando Bandini, from an opposite endogenous perspective, replied that it was precisely in the Veneto province, later called the Northeast, that the social and cultural transformations that had already begun in the Fifties in Italy were experienced in a “much more violent” way and this was the cause of our current present. These radical changes have been felt on the skin of the Venetians more than “any lazy ‘metropolitan’ look could perceive; what came out as nw could seem erroneously similar to previous and consolidated phenomena”. In short, the devastating modernity of the late twentieth century was more shocking in the province than in the big cities. The century that had begun putting everything in crisis- with the declared death of every value, of God, culture, art, poetry, family,etc- ended with the death, not simply declared, but real, of the values of the earth and its traditions. Human crisis and social crisis.
Thus a whole rural world was violently wiped out. The farms were pulled down and the crops were uprooted to erect blocks of flats and warehouses; old furniture and old straw chairs were burnt to make room, first, for those in formica and plastic ones, then, for the new straw-like chairs produced in China. “It was our long Crystal Night”, Gibo says, “where books the freedom of thought were thrown into the fire, along with the chairs (called “careghe” in Venetian dialect) and our origins”. There was a difference, though: the books were burnt by the Nazis, historically the absolute evil of Humanity, whereas the chairs were burnt by the same blood as those who had built them and usually made sure they were repaired.
A poem by Zanzotto, taken from “Idioma”:
Straw stuffed chairs, chair manufacturers.
Here come the chair-stuffers forming almost a secret society among them, they use a jargon only they know
and they have a void in their stomach that they alone know:
here comes the first one,
he stuffs the chair and among the straw he leaves a herring which the cat will tear away so that whoever comes later, a good colleague, he too will find a chair to stuff, and so be it.
Dopo il nonno Francesco, è la seconda persona cui Gibo dedica una carèga. Evidentemente ha sentito il dovere di fissare l’impronta anche di quella vita speciale. Turoldo era friulano e alla terra e all’umiltà delle sue origini è sempre stato fedele. Le carèghe de paja appartengono anche alla sua storia. Vi è una poesia molto bella di Turoldo, cara a Gibo, che di fronte ai gran- di misteri della fede, che sono della stessa materia con cui sono fatti gli irrisolvibili misteri dell’arte, dice:
It was a rural world where work solidarity existed and there was no competition. A chair manufacturer always had a straw seat to repair. Those who had come to do the work before him had made sure to do so, leaving a little grease of herring between the new stems, then the cat would do the rest.
Gibo’s first chair is from 1998, where he writes of having been inspired by the memory of his grandfather Francesco, who had “his” chair, as everyone in the house had one and they were responsible for it. The chair was his “throne” as the head of the family, says Gibo, and the chair had taken the mold of his body: the seat was broken by the weight and decades of use. “When I furtively sat down as a child, I had the perception of all the grandeur of his adult body compared to my child’s.”
Angelo Falmi, an artist now engaged in the creation of a series of 99 paintings on the subject of the chair, points out that it is the most anthropomorphic object. Each of its parts refers in form to the shadow or to the guardian angel of man, always ready to rescue him and give him support.
Gibo writes about his grandfather Francesco’s chair: “it never had a definite place, it walked around the house and the courtyard following the sun: in the morning it was next to the door with a bowl and a spoon, at noon it was at the head of the table for lunch, in the warm hours of noon you could see it under the pergola and at sunset it was near the crackling fireplace. Fluctuating spirits moved it around constantly, shadows I couldn’t catch ”.
In 2014, sixteen years after that first test, Gibo will make another chair, entitled “Where are they?”. A slingshot was hung on its back, Gibo’s favorite child’s play. In the broken seat the grandfather returns and, through the sling, Gibo the child comes back. It might seem the most Pascolian of his artworks: a “regression to childhood”, where he resurrects his grandfather and becomes calmer under his protection, reliving the happiness of the carefree hours spent playing with the slingshot in the fields and in the courtyard of the house, outside the history and its horrors, far from the social decadence and its disgrace.
But Gibo does not make, like Pascoli, an escape from the world, he does not have the desire to shut himself in his family “nest”, in the safety of blood the least place for salvation, because Gibo does not fear death, which was at the center of Pascoli’s poetry. His symbolism is not psychological but it’s historical-sociological.
Even in his other great theme, that of the vegetable Garden, he does not resort to nature to escape from the present, but nature, vegetables, such as chairs, artworks of rural memory, and even his books, are the topics-objects he contrasts the social and human drift of our time with.
Proof of this is the chair, realised in 2011 between the two mentioned above, dedicated to the figure of Father David Maria Turoldo, entitled “Mystic solitude”. Gibo knew Turoldo. They met in the late seventies. Gibo preserves an admirable page of his diary on that day. It was a spring morning and he attended, against his will, the school for surveyors in Vicenza. Sometimes it was really hard for him to attend school so he sometimes bunked. He usually did it alone, without companions. In those hours of non-education, he had to think, so he preferred to go around the city all alone. That spring morning he went up to Monte Berico. It is the ideal place when the sun is shining and spring is all about blossoming.
However, that morning Gibo entered the church. There were few people and, compared to the dazzling light of outside, it was almost pitch dark inside. Passing in front of a desk, he heard a voice that said to him: “where are you going?” It was a cavernous, deep, ancient voice, coming out of a friar’s face of the past, with a big nose and thin hair that was long on the sides, which added to that long face. It is Father David Maria Turoldo. Gibo first found an excuse: “I told him that there was a strike at school”, but he immediately heard the friar answer: “liar”. Then he confessed: “I haven’t gone to school”. Turoldo knew that those who don’t go to school usually do not enter into a church. They spoke a little, so Turoldo, taking leave from him, said: “in ten days we will meet again here, but after school, and you will tell me where your thinking took you”. After his grandfather Francesco, he is the second person to whom Gibo dedicates a chair. Evidently he felt the duty to imprint the memory of that special life as well. Turoldo was from Friuli and he was faithful to the land and to the humility of his origins. The straw chairs also belong to his history. There is a very beautiful poem by Turoldo, dear to Gibo, that deals with the great mysteries of the faith, which are made of the same material as the unsolvable mysteries of art. It says:
“Lord,
from me you will have just
rough verses: stanzas made of verses worthy of my poverty of origin.
To others […] is to celebrate the fabulous procession: […] But my peasant mother of my Friuli, the poorest one in the country, used to tell me: “Son, they are things too big for us!”
This high humility is also in Gibo’s chairs, which express the voice of the native land of rural Veneto, rich of faith and poetry. The one that Gibo’s chairs evoke is not a Pascolian escape in the “nest” but it is a move towards the “truth” that the rural world, with its pains and sufferings, with its humility and sincerity, with its know how to work and his sacred respect for the work of others, he knew how to express.
Turoldo was a poet who brought history and the present into judgment. His poetry was said to contain a “biblical-prophetic” tone.
Gibo’s latest chair – made in 2016 are entitled with the biblical expression “Sic Turbo” with a top put on the seat almost to shout with Turoldo: “West, stop destroying my time!”, that is, stop the rampant madness. If we reflect on the message in the title of the series of books “The Twelve Apostles” of 2017, a “biblical-prophetic-evangelical” title, we grasp the deep affinity of Gibo’s work with Turoldian thought: it very much defines the sense of going back to the rural, ethical values, not in a Pascoli-like style, but one could say in the style of the Venetian school: Turoldo, Zanzotto, Camon, Rigoni Stern and Pasolini, poet of Casarsa.
But the chair dedicated to Turoldo also touches a personal aspect of the old priest-poet-prophet: his loneliness, his awareness of having been forgotten by men, those “last ones” to whom he had dedicated a daily commitment throughout his life. His sermons in the Cathedral of Milan, his invectives, his declarations, his complaints, his will to want to renew even the religious institution, his own poetry eventually fell on deaf ears.
…Then
absolute darkness, compact as pitch:
darkness as if we were no longer existing.
–––––
Then the silence, only silence, absolute silence: mute,
leaden, dense silence!
The unsolvable solitude of Turoldo lives on in the “story” of Gibo’s chair to become the solitude in which contemporary man has sunk. The chairs are empty. Witnesses of a presence that was. Guardian angels with no man left. No one comes to occupy them now. Participation has ceased. We all live remotely on the platforms or inside the net of virtual friendship dialogues, always concerned with in the indispensable weather forecast, offered by the apps in our mobile phones. The chairs are empty around the family table, in the churches, at party venues, in the cultural salons, in the cinema halls, in the theater parterres. So much effort to fill a few seats, when one decides to do it.
The Gibo chairs are 5 … an odd number, as if at his table there was a chair ready to be added, next to the one dedicated to Vivaldi, entitled “Rosso primavera”, made in 2015: it is the most virtuous of all, with his violin, a sublime homage to his Venetian origins and to the genius of his people: it is the chair of the artist, of the poet, to whom we could ask for a sign:
A verse …
Crack on the infinite like
Christ’s open ribs cage …
Only one verse can make
“The universe bigger”.
(David Maria Turoldo)