• Gabriele Picco

Mezza giornata gigante sospesa

Dreams: if I had to describe the method and the motivations that form the basis of my work, that is where I would start, from dreams, because they cannot be fully explained, they are experienced with the eyes closed, and they pertain to our desires.
Gabriele Picco.

With his customary visionariness Picco has for this exhibition mixed the most disparate of materials and objects, creating a sort of magical depository, where ideas like death, the passing of time and failure are treated with irony and a playfulness that verges on the poetic.

Crossing the threshold of the gallery we find ourselves immersed in an oneiric atmosphere: on the walls there are paintings made of dust (and other residue that Picco took from the bags of vacuum cleaners, as he had already done previously for several of his sculptures) while in the space’s center stands a sculpture depicting a sort of funeral monument to a clown, chiseled into the white marble of Carrara.

Scattered on the floor in the second room are banana peels, just like the ones used by clowns in their most iconic gags, with the difference that they have been cast out of bronze, thus being elevated to the status of classical sculptures, like little miniature monuments to our fragilities.

On the walls instead one finds the Brillo Paintings, blue and pink pictures that once more denote Picco’s wish to experiment and amuse himself with the most unusual of materials. This time the artist has gone from house dust to the steel wool used to clean pots and pans (they are indeed the steel wool that is sold in the famous Warholian boxes by the company Brillo). They are simply glued onto canvases prepared with a uniform background, and the material and chromatic result is astonishing, somewhere between Yves Klein, Gilardi and Piero Manzoni.

In conclusion, visiting Gabriele Picco’s show means not having to search for a meaning or an explanation, but rather letting oneself be led by sensation and feeling. Just as the artist has suggested, it is as though one were observing the works with one’s eyes closed, as though they had sprung directly from our unconscious, and the gallery had been suddenly transformed into that distant, far off land that abides in each of us.