• Gabriele Picco

Freud at Starbucks

In his second solo show at Francesca Minini’s gallery, Gabriele Picco expresses very well his versatility, ranging from drawing to sculpture to video as he has never done before, showing his originality.
Keeping the freshness and simplicity typical of his pen drawings and some assemblages of the ’90, Picco works with the most disparate objects, shifting from a shoe to a pear to an ethnic sculpture, with the nonchalance and the shamelessness of a child.
Entering the gallery, you run across a crazed jungle where tigers appear from ostrich-eggs, wooden birds eat real apples, chips columns erect towards the sky mixing the fast food with Brancusi.
Everyday a sunday is the slogan of the well-known Mc Donald’s ice cream. Picco uses it as title of one of his sculpture made of a seagull in balance on an egg almost magically supported by a pincer.
The image composed by trivial objects becomes almost a holy altar, keeping something classical in its being ordinary. Also the hieratic Monumento africano a Isaac Newton is able to absorb far away cultures (from Africa to China) connecting them to a completely western point of view.
Being visionary, Gabriele Picco constrains us to leave all logical thoughts behind and walk into an imaginary world in which we could find Freud at Sturbucks sipping a cappuccino. Or we could run across a Perrier bottle pierced by a kitchen knife continuously splashing water from the wound thanks to an hydraulic system. For this meaning load sculpture, Il coltello nell’acqua, Picco steals the title of the first Roman Polanski’s movie referring to the symbolic value of water, just as the artist does in this art work.
Water is also the subject of the only painting exhibited. Enigmatic black shapes, in a tribal and Matisse-like dance, transport pieces of an unexplainably consolidated sea.
On show also four videos shooted by the artist in four apartments where he lived (in Brescia and New York). Again simple images of everyday life, such as a milk pot or some spaghetti, become the starting point of a reflection upon the real, sometimes an ironic load thought, sometimes a mystery load one.