Post by virtu on Apr 11, 2009 16:58:13 GMT -8
Been admiring Gabriels sculptures for awhile and his current show at Mondo is exceptional.
www.mondobizzarro.net/gallery/index.php
GABRIELS
"Toys for Melancholy Kids"
April 4 - May 5 2009
Info from Mondo Bizzaro below
Born in 1971, Gabriels is a brilliant Italian sculptor who has already realized a series of works showing his undeniable creative talent.
He showed his creations in a solo exhibition in Tulsa (United States).
From a figurative point of view, his works – embryonic and bizarre creatures with glassy eyes, attractive like sparkling toys but distant as archetypal idols – are strongly related to the pop-surrealist and fantastic trend of the contemporary international art.
In oppositon to the rhetoric idea of monumental and celebratory sculpture, Gabriels offers an innovative vision of the sculpture itself, which becomes "small and manageable” assuming a fully contemporary pop value. Even if made of polished bronze and dominated by a highly controlled geometry that gives them an appearance of great symmetrical rigor, his works are supple and sensual like modern design objects, cold like surgical tools but at the same time ironic like vinyl toys of the latest generation. They are also sectional, metamorphic and investigable as the body parts of a living organism.This implies a direct, intimate and very playful enjoyment of artwork, as if it was a valuable three-dimensional puzzle with which it becomes possible to investigate and compose the ultimate meaning of the forms and to contemplate their singular beauty.
In this first solo show in Italy, Gabriels will present sixteen sculptures in bronze: unique pieces that can often be opened and that are composed of removable internal organs in bronze, too.
ARTIST'S STATMENT
These sculptures are not sculptures, of course, but toys, and more precisely prototypes of toys for melancholics.
In this sense our toys for melancholics scrupulously respect all standards of global melancholy quality, addressing themselves without fear and delay to a public of adults, kiddies and lithopaedia.
The fundamental characteristics of the authentic toy for melancholic are:
the modest stature and the glabrous, reflecting hide;
the vitreous eyes, which let the melancolic indulge in the sad thoughts of the loss of aura (Benjamin) and of the noble distance of idols (Marion);
a tenderly simulated and, after all, mellifluously exhibited vocation for the utensil and the biomorphical mechanic;
an immodest, prehistoric, even ludicrous inclination towards the acute excrescence and the transcendental exhibition of the condition of possibility of tooth, spine, quill, claw, beak and rostrum;
it always respects the proportional canon according to which hope is to lollipop (lollip-hope) as melancholic’s rigmarole is to carillon’s ghostly mechanism;
the (episodically) disassemblable structure, which, denying the mystery of the interior through his opening, destroy the hated mimetic faculty and always again reduces the irritating ambition of the sculpture to the more pleasant dimensions of the toy.
www.mondobizzarro.net/gallery/index.php
GABRIELS
"Toys for Melancholy Kids"
April 4 - May 5 2009
Info from Mondo Bizzaro below
Born in 1971, Gabriels is a brilliant Italian sculptor who has already realized a series of works showing his undeniable creative talent.
He showed his creations in a solo exhibition in Tulsa (United States).
From a figurative point of view, his works – embryonic and bizarre creatures with glassy eyes, attractive like sparkling toys but distant as archetypal idols – are strongly related to the pop-surrealist and fantastic trend of the contemporary international art.
In oppositon to the rhetoric idea of monumental and celebratory sculpture, Gabriels offers an innovative vision of the sculpture itself, which becomes "small and manageable” assuming a fully contemporary pop value. Even if made of polished bronze and dominated by a highly controlled geometry that gives them an appearance of great symmetrical rigor, his works are supple and sensual like modern design objects, cold like surgical tools but at the same time ironic like vinyl toys of the latest generation. They are also sectional, metamorphic and investigable as the body parts of a living organism.This implies a direct, intimate and very playful enjoyment of artwork, as if it was a valuable three-dimensional puzzle with which it becomes possible to investigate and compose the ultimate meaning of the forms and to contemplate their singular beauty.
In this first solo show in Italy, Gabriels will present sixteen sculptures in bronze: unique pieces that can often be opened and that are composed of removable internal organs in bronze, too.
ARTIST'S STATMENT
These sculptures are not sculptures, of course, but toys, and more precisely prototypes of toys for melancholics.
In this sense our toys for melancholics scrupulously respect all standards of global melancholy quality, addressing themselves without fear and delay to a public of adults, kiddies and lithopaedia.
The fundamental characteristics of the authentic toy for melancholic are:
the modest stature and the glabrous, reflecting hide;
the vitreous eyes, which let the melancolic indulge in the sad thoughts of the loss of aura (Benjamin) and of the noble distance of idols (Marion);
a tenderly simulated and, after all, mellifluously exhibited vocation for the utensil and the biomorphical mechanic;
an immodest, prehistoric, even ludicrous inclination towards the acute excrescence and the transcendental exhibition of the condition of possibility of tooth, spine, quill, claw, beak and rostrum;
it always respects the proportional canon according to which hope is to lollipop (lollip-hope) as melancholic’s rigmarole is to carillon’s ghostly mechanism;
the (episodically) disassemblable structure, which, denying the mystery of the interior through his opening, destroy the hated mimetic faculty and always again reduces the irritating ambition of the sculpture to the more pleasant dimensions of the toy.