DOES HYPER-REALISM USE THE LANGUAGE OF REALITY OR IS IT A COPY OF IT?

edited by Paola Cassinelli

It is impossible to look at Gibo’s works without being pervaded by the uncontrollable desire to touch them. It is absurd, almost blasphemous, to touch the material to satisfy the curiosity that assails at first, yet it is equally impossible to refrain from contact because the careful research of the artist aims to render his work the sum of infinite and adequately represented elements, to reproduce, with iron, a reality bordering on the surreal. Absence of Muses, White Elsewhere, Suspended Inspiration, Beyond the Iris, Slash , The Four Apples and Cézanne’s Apple are seven splendid sculptures that demonstrate Gibo’s desire to produce works that, in addition to the aesthetic pleasure and the possibility of being quickly interpreted with the use of simple symbols belonging to our daily life, encourage the observer to reflect, communicate and understand, through the use of complex cryptic languages. Listening to Gibo’s words and then analyzing his punctual sketches, we realize we are in front of a meticulous professional who, after thoroughly investigating all the meanders of art, exhibits himself with works that represent the completeness of being. As I have repeatedly stressed, Gibo is an artist who must be known before meeting his sculptures; he is a character who never leaves anything to chance, he exercises and experiments until obsessing about each spark that appears in his inquiring and curious mind. Each word has a precise meaning that is transferred to the thousand signs that compose its diligent studies and sketches, but when the sculpture comes to life, its material inflames the observer who receives a communicative and aesthetic force that penetrates and transmits a tangible pleasure. For this reason I have always loved Gibo’s abstract works: they allow me to communicate with myself through a subjective linguistic universe and lead me to believe that I am able to materialize unexpressed states of being. It is also exciting to enter his highly cultured hyperrealism that leads us to know this great master’s modus operandi: he does not limit himself to understanding the where or when, but digs until he reveals the why of his sinuous, distinct, structured and erudite work and he cannot refrain from communicating his thoughts verbally, as well. Even if the simplicity of his subjects can be misleading, Gibo’s work is complex, the banality is non-existent in it, his work is subjected to careful analysis and verification in every operational phase until the achievement of excellent results in the final material conceptualization of the epilogue, that is the physical and visual approach to the artwork. Starting from Absence of Muses, the visual correspondence with Giorgio Morandi’s works is unmistakable. Behind the easel on a high base, some objects are placed in a peculiar order: two bottles, a tin box, a jar and a small bowl containing a lemon; still life tidily pre-disposed. In front of the base, an easel sustains a canvas on which the aforementioned objects are reproduced with great precision, and a fuzzy dusty background, which further validates the references to the great Emilian master’s paintings and incisions. Under the painting, there is a stained cloth, used brushes and paint tubs, some of them used and left open, dribbling, waiting for the artist to come back and start using them again, rendered with a perfect, imaginative three-dimensionality. All this is created with a masterful ironmongering style, with delicate almost impalpable features and with a rigorous colouring technique which highlights a game of shadows and relies on the extreme balance of objects that lead the spectator to question the real material the piece is made out of.
The moment we stop to reflect and analyse the title, we notice that Gibo wants to offer his public a other opportunity: to lead the mind and the memory to an intellectual commitment we are no longer used to, because of the rampant technology. Morandi’s Muses are not meant to be found in the grand subjects of classical art, the nine beautiful daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne representing the supreme ideal of art, but amongst the bottles of different colours and shapes gathered and left at the workshop. They point to a choice of simple contents, shifting the attention to the light and the painting quality. In his artistic path, Morandi didn’t choose a muse, as many other artists and intellectuals did, to inspire him for his paintings and drawings. He built his subjects searching, in the confusion of his workshop, for elements that caught his attention for their balance, geometry, harmony, symmetry and plurality of features. All these considerations are transmitted in Perlotto’s works, with a language that unites practice and art theory and shows the seemingly anonymous reality that the artist decided to represent, letting the imagination and hermetic, dark considerations expand and multiply. The same procedure is found in White Elsewhere: a similar easel like in previous works, large brushes, a glass-like jar with thin brushes, spatulas, paint tubes scattered open, the same usual stained cloth, placed under a ripped canvas painted in red; an iron canvas, surrounded by elements made of the same material, a cold, rigid, unimaginative material, which comes to life from the afflatus transmitted by the mastery of its performer, who proudly put a signature to his work. The work has an unmistakable relationship with Lucio Fontana’s paintings, but the “white” Gibo refers to in his title is not only the colour of a clean canvas waiting for the artist’s imprint, but to the one of the Manifesto Blanco, the first theoretical text decreeing the birth of the Spacialism, published in 1946 in Buenos Aires. The words of this manifesto showed that the artists in those years were not interested in following a stylistic current or in creating an accurate and composed image, but they experimented and turned to various researches among which the one about the third dimension stood out, even in painting. Fontana achieves this by turning his attention not the drawing or the colours, but to the cuts and craters that demarcate the birth of Spatialism. With simplicity and sharpness, Perlotto shows in his sculpture Fontana’s pictorial solution of reaching the all-inclusive perception of space intended as an absolute fusion of time, direction, movement, sound and light, through some paraphrases of well-known images. Gibo offers teachings and advice and educates the observer through images and syllogisms and therefore, to understand completely his work and commitment, it is necessary to deepen the knowledge of the artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century. Following the idea behind Perlotto’s artistic training, it is possible to achieve the synthesis of procedures that ensures the success of a project, thanks to the experimentation and the fusion of matter and thought. Seeing his work, appreciating it and having the pleasure of owning it takes place only after the union of several sensory stimuli, allowing you to reach the apex of satisfaction, often regardless of traditional canons. In 1960s Ian Wilson stopped producing “objects” to focus only on language, on the oral narrative, built on mental notes: today while recognizing the value of art and the movements that came before him, Perlotto proceeds with his convictions kept in his artistic baggage, from which he cannot and does not absolutely want to get away to continue to give completeness and consistency to his artistic commitment. Suspended Inspiration talks about the difficult moment during which unpredictable and imperceptible interferences prevent the artist from continuing his desired artistic project. Everything is at the ready, the working desk, jar and brushes, the palette, the paint tubes, the cloth. But the sketched landscape that can be glimpsed on the rigid iron canvas is incomplete, waiting for the artist to find his creative power. In this case too Gibo stops to analyse not an image, but an intimate situation of human psychology and raises doubts and questions, leading us towards the mental and immaterial production of a dense sequence of short statements. Gibo proposes a type of art that, in a difficult period of mistrust and discouragement that constricts people into isolation and solitude, remind us of how we have often had to rebuild the daily life with optimism and trust, supported by and faithful to our unattackable and solid certainties. An art that may appear nuanced, like the sketch on the canvas, but which will soon find its intense energy. Slash, another Hamletic doubt, shows a humble frame that Gibo sends me so that he can speak of this object as “a work of art”. What does Perlotto want to tell? That art is this, too? That critics have spent rivers of words explaining an empty frame to the public? That conceptually there is a great value, but aesthetically it is nothing? But haven’t we been taught that art is a complex composition of elements? Has the canvas been removed from the frame, torn, destroyed by unknown causes, perhaps by natural disasters, or is it the artist who designs this precise installation with scrupulously defined intent? Are we facing a minimalist work of art, such as Robert Ryman’s White Canvases exhibited in the most important museums in the world, or is this just a fortuitous finding in his grandpa’s cellar? The questions are many and the answers infinite. Gibo leaves us free to read his work with our imagination and we get lost in its rigid structures which welcome us softly, aware that they are asking us to reflect. However, for Gibo the art represents the set of natural and spiritual events that overwhelm man and of which he himself becomes his interpreter, succeeding, in the seriousness of his intent, to smile through more or less fictional anecdotes that they remind us that even the artists, in their proverbial crazy genius, are men and so they have been treated over the centuries and have cemented strong and indissoluble bonds, which have devoted them to immortality. This is why Gibo, with his sculpture entitled The Four Apples, depicting a canvas that lacks the fourth apple, executed with the style and coloristic taste of Paul Cézanne, is connected to a fun and life-like anecdote described in Irving Stone’s 1934 book, Lust for Life. Stone tells, in a folkloristic way, that upon entering the shop of the art dealer Père Tanguy, a customer asks for the price of the painting in the shop window, representing four apples painted by Cézanne. The dealer’s wife proposes a price too high for the customer who finally agrees with her to purchase only a slice of the painting, in which there was only one apple: “100 francs for four apples, therefore 25 francs for only one apple”. Is this story true or false? It does not matter to answer this question, even if it is documented that from the mid-nineteenth century many paintings or drawings were disassembled by antiques dealers for commercial purposes. Gibo presents his work in the same spirit as Stone’s, with a missing part: what interests him is not the object, but the effect it gets on the public by illustrating a story that tells of unpublished testimonies related to painting, to the history of art, the history of restoration, sculpture and also to the life of the artist himself who shows a great loyalty to his “job”. As for many other forms, Cézanne’s apple accompanies Gibo in his artistic career: in fact we find the apple, all alone in a sculpture, on a work surface, next to a palette just abandoned by a painter, insinuating itself in a piece of work, trying to make the observer forget the apple’s mimetic function. Thanks to the colour, style and taste, a visual approach with the mythical world of Cézanne, his chromatic research and the construction of an appearance of his own, governed by laws independent from the natural and emotional detail of the object. Gibo teaches art history through images: he mixes concepts, materials and technique. He forces us to reason and evaluate. He drags us into an artistic vortex where imitation is the last element that characterises his work. He puts us to the test and waits to see what level we can reach: to look at his sculptures is like entering a maze and trying to come out of it resolving a rebus. The same sensation is felt when walking into his workshop. The first time I went to Trissino and I entered Perlotto’s studio I felt scrutinised and I understood that if I didn’t get his “poetics”, I would have come out of that wonderful place where everything is life-like, without being able to borrow anything for my show. I looked and didn’t talk because it was clear the artist’s desire to understand who I was. It was true that I had come from miles away to see his original work, but I could also have been just a curious person. I kept quiet as I touched, asking for permission, but must of all I wondered which one of the situations depicted in front of me was the most fascinating. The vegetable crate, the books, the stairs, the jacket, the baskets, the shoes: everything was covered and every piece was unveiled at pre-establishes times, one at a time, with pauses that allowed the eye and the mind to fuse and to tacitly enjoy the emotions originating from the vision of every single art piece. It was incredible to be able to walk amongst his sculptures, which retrieved traditions of ancient and modern art, with a realism of shocking photographical fidelity, but also with shapes reminding of the most ancient abstract solutions. You could breathe pure art in that studio. What could be sensed at once was the magic, changed by the technique, by the material, by the compact tones and by the search of light: I lived and experienced the illusion of reality. The competence acquired in the ironmongering technique was certainly a sign of a long-lasting family practice. Gibo understood secrets that only ancient traditions and abilities could pass on. The silent presence of his father Germano, passed in 1991, was tangible and definitely predominant in the memories, words and encounters that still soared undisturbed in the sunlight coming in through the windows and created a metaphysical atmosphere. It is through Beyond the Iris, beyond the rainbow of colour and light originating from Gibo’s works that the cultural baggage of the artist can be appreciated. It is made of deep knowledge, continuous research and experimentation. The two volumes, tattered by their usage, with a pencil on them, placed on the table with brushes, paint tubes, palette and cloth represent a world made not just of technique but also of awareness, mastery, culture, experience, respect and humility. Gibo makes us understand that his works can’t be appreciated only for their incredible ability to be identified, for their craftsmanship. They also have to be revealed with patience, read attentively, acquired with knowledge and most of all, discovered for that language of reality directed to those who really want to listen, with their eyes too, because, despite their substance, Angelo Gilberto Perlotto’ masterpieces are intangible and they need time and space to be accurately and analytically read.