Ode to the Shitty Situations and Tragicomic Events in an Artist’s Life
歌颂艺术家生活中的糟糕状况与悲剧事件
艺术家 : Michele Gabriele
NEVVEN is proud to present Ode to the Shitty Situations and Tragicomic Events in an Artist’s Life, a solo show by Italian artist Michele Gabriele, presenting an installation of his hyperrealistic signature style sculptures, using both his personal story and pop culture to question the nature of memory and sensorial experience in the post digital contemporary world.
In the book entitled The End Of Time: The Next Revolution in Our Understanding of the Universe, theoretical physicist Julian Barbour writes: “We do not see things as they are but as the brain interprets them for us.” Thus he tries to explain how time is perceived in a reality that is - accordingly to his theory - a timeless succession of separate moments, where past and future are just an illusion. In an artistically declined way, the works of Gabriele seem to assert the same and add to this assumption a question more: in such reality, what remains real? Masterly using synthetic and organic materials, resins and mechanical components, the Italian artist has been exploring throughout his whole career the border between art and fictional reality, between philosophy and pop culture phenomena, leaving behind a scary, irreverent and humorous trail of sculptures and memorable installations. The materials employed, defined and treated by the artists as ‘hyper- materials’, become instrumental to portray reality and its illusions in a way that wants to appear ‘more real than reality itself’. This specific approach to materiality and hyperrealistic figuration lies at the core of the artistic language used by Gabriele, and at the same time it is where his practice detaches the most from the tradition of hyperrealistic sculpture. The Italian artist, uninterested in the portraiture of the visible world as-it-is, presents us with a realistic portraiture of a surreal world, which is augmented and hypertrophic, similar to the reality and virtual experiences proper of contemporary pop culture, video games and movies. Gabriele’s sculptures materialise digital reality into the real world. They are grounded in an unique sensibility about digital experience and materials, their symbology and meaningful existence as fictional and real objects - which brings to mind Object Oriented Ontology - and intersects philosophical and psychological questions through idiosyncratic discourses.
The works included in Ode to the Shitty Situations and Tragicomic Events in an Artist’s Life start from the personal story of Gabriele
as an artist in Italy. Conceived initially as a sort of monument to the worst or ‘most tragicomical’ experiences in his professional life, these sculptures, upon further investigation, conceptually yield a reflection on the way in which our memory and experience function, their validity and corruptibility. The pieces become symbols of a past no longer needed to be remembered, or maybe, no longer possible to be remembered as it really happened. The unintelligible text in the manuscripts, meticulously created by the artist, brings with it glitching memories, important to be preserved yet lost in their specificity, seemingly ancient, yet stored in shattered, futuristic containers. This series, at the core of the exhibition, is completed by It’s Always so Hard to Admit That Things Are Different Than What We Had Believed at First Sight. The sculpture, featuring two Velociraptor’s heads, invites us to take even a step further and possibly question the foundations of reality itself. Here Gabriele is showing not a corrupted memory from the past (or the future), but a distorted image from a surreal possible present. These figures, replicas of the creatures in the movie Jurassic Park, look plausible to our eyes as a consequence of our familiarity with one of the most viewed movies of all time, and with this conundrum Gabriele - together with physics - humorously leaves us to question our perception of reality, memory and experience in the contemporary post digital world we live in.
— Mattia Lullini and Alina Vergnano
谷歌翻译：
NEVVEN很荣幸能在意大利艺术家米歇尔·加布里埃尔（Michele Gabriele）的个展《艺术家的生活》中向“糟糕的境遇和悲剧事件颂歌”，展示他的超现实主义签名风格雕塑的装置，同时利用他的个人故事和流行文化来质疑后数字时代的世界中的记忆和感官体验。
在《时间的终结：我们对宇宙的理解中的下一场革命》一书中，理论物理学家朱利安·巴尔伯（Julian Barbour）写道：“我们看不到事物的本来面目，而是大脑为我们解释它们。” 因此，他试图解释在现实中如何感知时间，根据他的理论，该现实是永恒的独立时刻的接续，而过去和未来只是一种幻想。加布里埃尔（Gabriele）的作品以一种艺术上的衰落方式断言是相同的，并为这个假设增加了一个问题：在这样的现实中，什么仍然是真实的？这位意大利艺术家主要使用合成和有机材料，树脂和机械组件，在他的整个职业生涯中一直在探索艺术与虚构现实之间，哲学与流行文化现象之间的界限，留下令人恐惧，不敬，幽默的雕塑和令人难忘的踪迹装置。使用的材料，被艺术家定义并视为“超材料”的工具，以一种想要表现为“比真实本身更真实”的方式，描绘了现实及其幻觉。这种针对物质性和超现实主义形象的特定方法是加布里埃（Gabriele）使用的艺术语言的核心，同时也是他的实践与超现实主义雕塑的最大区别所在。这位意大利艺术家对原形的可见世界不感兴趣，向我们展示了一个超现实世界的写实肖像，该现实世界被增强和肥大，类似于当代流行文化，视频游戏的现实和虚拟体验和电影。Gabriele的雕塑将数字现实变成了现实世界。它们基于对数字体验和资料的独特敏感性，
“艺术家生活中的卑鄙情节和悲剧事件颂”中的作品从加布里埃尔的个人故事开始
作为意大利的艺术家。这些雕塑最初被认为是他职业生涯中最糟糕或“最悲惨的”经历的纪念碑，这些雕塑经过进一步研究，从概念上对我们的记忆和体验的作用方式，有效性和腐败性进行了反思。这些碎片成为过去的象征，不再需要记住，或者也许不再像过去那样被记住。由艺术家精心制作的手稿中难以理解的文字带来了一些令人毛骨悚然的记忆，这些记忆很重要，需要保留但又不能因其特殊性而丢失，看似古老，但仍存放在破碎的，未来派的容器中。该系列是展览的核心，由总是很难承认事情不同于我们一见钟情。该雕塑有两个迅猛龙的头部，邀请我们走得更远，甚至可能质疑现实本身的基础。在这里，Gabriele所展示的不是过去（或未来）的记忆受损，而是来自超现实可能的存在的失真图像。这些数字，是电影《侏罗纪公园》中生物的复制品，由于我们对有史以来观看次数最多的电影之一的熟悉，以及加布里埃尔（Nabriele）与物理学的困惑，使我们对自己的眼睛看起来很合理。我们对生活中的当
今后数字世界的现实，记忆和体验的感知 。— Mattia Lullini和Alina Vergnano
