Giuseppe Gallo. The Other Reality of Art
By Rolf Lauter
My first approach to the work of Giuseppe Gallo was by getting to know the
man himself: there was his friendly and spontaneous, in other words his
“Italian”, nature on the one hand but, on the other, he also had a cautious
attitude: at first these seemed to me to be two contradictory sides to the
man. But his lively ideas, his knowledgeable
explanations and his
philosophical thought when talking about wine, landscapes, mankind and his
experiences of life, clearly showed that these apparent contradictions were
“another reality of life and of art”. Slowly I came to know a person who, in his
complexity, reminded me of Alighiero Boetti,1 one who was strongly drawn
to nature, to his home and culture as well as to the persons he met,
someone who drew his strength from his fruitful dialogue with the extreme
contradictions of the world.
The Studio
The studio Gallo has used for over twenty years, near to Rome university, is
a place flooded with light and the aura of which oscillates between artistic
order and chaos. Scattered around were: the tools of his trade, cans of paint
and brushes on a shelf, African masks, an easel, Cuban music, tubes of
paint in a glass cabinet, and small plaster figures, documents, an armchair, a
sheet of glass, a frame with wedges, a glass working table, a table lamp, on
the working table was a sculpture in cast metal in the shape of a rock and
whose outline suggested Christ on the cross, a sculptor’s pedestal with a
bronze figure, pictures and objects on the walls, a divan, a small table with a
few newspapers, catalogues and pens, the forms of finished paintings.
A space full of plans, ideas, works, history and the present. In this ambience,
contemporarily a refuge, the place for reflection and a space for creative
achievement, I was able to see some of the new pieces the artist has
worked on over the past year and a half. The sculptures in particular are
impressive, convincing in their conceptual rigour and their strength of
content, while other hardly finished paintings suggest a new path taken by
the artist and, therefore, a new figurative approach.
In Search of New Figurative Concepts
Gallo is an artist who has gone in search of truth or, rather, of artistic truth.
His main aim is the emphasise the fundamental connections present in
nature and in art, and the transmission of the knowledge of basic causes
and effects. Gallo creates his works starting from found objects or from
material elements of forms recuperated from his preceding works and
showing, in this way, a kind of double reality in art. Pictures develop starting
from other pictures, sculptures start from man-made objects or from raw
material, drawings gain their strength from the interaction between figure
and space, form and surface, faithful reproduction and metaphor. Gallo is, in
a certain sense, an iconoclast who throws everything away in order to invent
a new creative world, an individual cosmos, and to speculate on the
universal cosmos. Gallo digs down to the very origins of matter, form, colour,
and artistic creation so as to elaborate, beginning from the creative impulse,
an empirical example, as well as to understand and to realise the process of
the figurative formulation of his works as an ever new generative act.
Gallo explores the confines of his activity. On the one hand he tends towards
formal concentration and simplification, on the other he investigates the
structural complexities of nature and the world which allow him to give a
concrete form to the ideas in his figurative imagination.
With his look behind the curtains of the world’s functional mechanisms, Gallo
allows us a deeper knowledge of its internal connections as well as those
between man and nature, man and the cosmos. His work is a research into
the origins of existence and its many expressions in the worlds of nature,
culture, and civilisation.
Sculpture
Autoritratti autoritari (Authoritarian Self-portraits). The work Autoritratti
autoritari, is a particularly surprising piece consisting of seven hatchets or
axes hung on the wall, all placed at the same distance from the floor. They
are aligned vertically and their blades all point to the right, like an army of
soldiers, ready to be used in cutting down trees or shaping wood. A closer
look creates doubts about the functionality of these objects: the handles are
white and without a doubt cast in bronze, the blades are not regular and
sharp but are elaborated in such a way as to seem the profiles of human
faces whose silhouettes float on the wall. From the point of view of the form
these objects can be seen as utensils of daily use with a “face”,
metaphorically speaking: objects with their own individuality!
The profile is repeated in all the blades, even though they have different
shapes, and different moods and expressions. It mirrors the face of the artist
and is, therefore, a kind of self-portrait. Despite their invariability each face
seems different according to the thickness, the length, the width and the
broadness of the blade. The functional aspect and the form adapted to the
face influence each other and give life to an indissoluble unity.
We see a short and wide blade and one that is longer and thinner, one that
is horizontal at the top, and another that is curved at the bottom, one ending
in a cone, one like a medieval battle axe and another with a large handle
sticking out at the bottom. These individual characteristics result from the
original use of the utensils that were its models, used for cutting down trees,
chopping wood, cutting into pieces, making tables, or sharpening pieces of
wood.
By isolating in an artistic context an instrument that was originally only used
as an implement, Gallo shows us – starting from the primary gesture of
Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made – the specific aura of the object of common
use elevated to the status of a work of art with all its many levels of meaning.
He shows us the process – often dealt with in descriptive terms in the
twentieth century, while in this case it is developed in a refined and acute
manner – of converting anything whatever into a work of art: by its material
transformation and its altered context it becomes “another” reality with
various meanings. The quality of the work is expressed through the dialectic
between the simplicity of form and expression and the complexity of the
message.
The axes are above all a homage to the technical evolution of our
civilisation, a result of man’s creativity. A development thanks to which man
has been able to guarantee for himself – and continues to do so – his
survival in the natural world and in the universe. Each form modelled as a
utensil is furthermore a consequence of the opposition of weights, forces,
ends, and functions. Through its distancing from daily life, the object that
was once one of common use, is raised to the status of a symbol. Through
his “individualisation” of the axe blades, Gallo exalts with refined care the
form of the utensils that was defined over the centuries and that remained
unchanged until now; he almost “humanises” it and demonstrates his
admiration for the intimate union between man and nature. Furthermore he
conceptually inserts in his work the idea of “destruction and of creative
development” (Henri Bergson) based on deconstruction and construction.
With simple means he alludes to the artistic and natural process of a
continual alternation between birth and death, as we can see it when a tree
is cut down and becomes part of a house. One of the most significant effects
generated by this work by Gallo is in fact his awareness of the fundamental
structures of the world and of cyclic social processes.
Femmina atroce (Atrocious Female). Another work in the artist’s studio
alludes, as a result of its soft, organic formal elements and its rhythmic and
serial order, above all to something fascinatingly feminine. On the wall are
four horizontal lines of bronze forms in the shape of lips. Each of these lines,
about 30 to 40 centimetres distant from the other, consists of seven
elements fixed in such a way as to touch and give the impression of flowing
into the others like waves, maintaining, though, despite the serial layout, a
kind of individual life as regards form. When looked at carefully the recurrent
module turns out to be the jaw of a whale, a module that Gallo has
reproduced in bronze 28 times and that has become a structural theme of
his work.
If looked down on, this single element resembles an object in the form of an
open mouth or shell; looked at from lower down it seems the abstract
reinterpretation of the female breast; and looked at from even lower down it
alludes to a winged form which, in this serial layout, has a rhythmic
configuration; looking at the work from the side, completely different
perspectives open out. Seen all together, the various equal components of
the work have a fluid and wave-like form and, according to the line you
observe, seem to move. The play of light and shade that underlines the
sculptural meaning and generates singular optical effects in the shadows
that fall on the walls, helps underline the aesthetic complexity and the
inherent quality of the work.
As a result of this particular layout, the individual elements are transformed
into something else. The original object and the artistic one were – until the
jaw was reproduced in bronze – the same. Taken from the original context
and placed repeatedly side by side, the observer sees them from a
completely different point of view and interprets them as something
“different”. If it is true that the various modules, like the overall work, remind
us above all of human bones or of other living beings, it is just as true that
their layout gives us the possibility for new associations and interpretations.
Each form can remind us of the form of a concave container like a holywater font but returns at once to being a form in itself, without possible
relationships to daily reality. Immediate references to Marcel Duchamp’s
“urinal” hung upside down on the wall are banished in front of the obvious
and natural beauty of the formal elements.
The viewer, in his approach to the sculpture, constantly hovers between the
temptation to relate it to its original concrete aspect and to give it a further
dimension. The relationship between real substance and apparent form
determine the intimate complexity of the work and stimulates one of the
basic questions of philosophy and perceptive psychology: the question of
being or appearing or – as Martin Heidegger said – of being and existing.
Mater dulcissima. “Man carries the last questions within himself, in a place
that is immediately accessible to him and where only he can hope to find the
key for answering the mystery of the world and lead it back to the essence of
things” (Arthur Schopenhauer).2
Gallo is an artist who tries to give the viewer the impression of finding
himself before something authentic, that “aura” of the original that is usually
lost when looking at a photograph. In this sense catalogues are for him only
a tool for approaching his art and can in no way substitute an immediate,
“here and now”3 observation of his works. In this he is similar to, among
others, the philosophers of the Enlightenment who had an important
precursor in Johann Gottfried Herder and his writings: in his essay Plastik he
postulated the perception of plasticity when seeing a three-dimensional work
of art as the most important difference with respect to the two-dimensionality
of painting.
In his work the artist tries to make concrete the difficult oscillation between a
clear denomination of the objects and their “formal manifestation”. An
exceptional example of this is Mater dulcissima a bronze work some 240
centimetres high which contains the formal elements both of a subject and of
an object. The sculpture is constructed as an empty carapace, a mantle that
opens at the front to allow the viewer to see inside. Towards the top of the
sculpture, like a hill or a heap, it gets thinner and ends in the silhouette of a
sketched head. The form of the head reminds us of a portrait of the artist.
In this bronze sculpture Gallo mixes various historical, artistic, and
naturalistic meanings that make the work a highly complex figurative event.
The mantle-like form alludes in a certain sense to the works of the medieval
Schutzmantelmadonna, the “Madonna of the Protective Mantle” painters,
and thus refers to the theme of protection and care. Gallo alludes on the one
hand to the protection of children by their mother and, at the same time, to
the maintenance of authenticity in art. This meaning is further underlined by
the portrait of the artist hidden within the form of the head.
If we observe the figure from the outside it resembles in many ways the
sculptures of Auguste Rodin and, in particular, his Balzac now on show in
the new wing of the MoMA in New York. Like Rodin’s sculptures, the work of
Gallo too is characterised by formal transience. The surface of the mantle is
characterised by soft modulations that exalt the play of light and shade. The
bronze figure seems almost to be about to move in front of our eyes, like
some virtually animated being. It also resembles a great rock shaped by the
wind and the rain, rising majestically up before us. The form alludes to the
indissoluble unity between man and nature, and the internal bond with its
foundations.4 It thus becomes a symbol. If looked at from the front the work
opens up like a cavern. The observer can enter into it and gain a sense of
security and protection. Gallo deals with a problem basic to modern times,
that of the relationship between the internal and external form of an object,
by correlating appearance and structure.
The theme of the cavern sparks off various allusions: references to man’s
primitive dwellings combine with feelings of maternal warmth or memories of
childhood and its hiding places. Then there is the female theme: as in the
famous picture by Courbet The Origin of the World, 1866, in which the
maternal womb also alludes to the idea of a cave, just as the bronze mantle
in Gallo’s work opens to life like the female genitals.5 It might be said that,
through his sculptural works, Gallo has revivified matter with the spirit of
woman.
Painting
Besides the three works in the round are three groups of pictures that show,
on another kind of support, a similar inquiry though now related to painting.
Merletto veneziano (Venetian Lace). With the first work which takes the form
of a dialogue, Gallo creates a picture starting from other previous paintings.
He cuts, tears, or derives from earlier richly coloured works, themes and
forms that he then transfers to a larger canvas and melds the single
elements into a new composition. The chromatic components are united by
a wax mixture that ensures the overall fixing. For Gallo the encaustic
technique, known since Roman times, has a particular meaning both for the
tradition it is part of and for a creative choice. In other words, the new picture
is born from the old works with all their history and meanings and creates a
superimposition of past and present. This particular painting technique also
reminds us of the modelling of a three-dimensional work. So Gallo applies, in
his realisation of a picture, techniques taken from sculpture. What is crucial
here is the use of wax as a material with a plastic aspect in a spatial and
optical sense.
In this work Gallo works over the whole panel, beginning with elements
coloured red, orange, yellow, and green, to create a light and open
composition with a basic vertical structure, and revealing, within this discreet
network of lines, a second aspect characterised by lively handling.
Various formal elements such as lines and surfaces – which seem partly
leaves and partly the traces of movement – intertwine into profiles of
animals, busts, self-portraits or the figures of philosophers. All this
transforms the composition into a ciphered representation of relationships, to
be understood as a reality that is “parallel to nature” and to its laws. Behind
this creation there is hidden a system of marks, codes, formal and chromatic
choices the meaning of which is known only to the artist and that –
analogously to what Alighiero Boetti proposed in his “Manifesto” in the sixties
– is conserved in a secure place inaccessible to others.
Nube manomessa (Manipulated Cloud). The same goes for Nube
manomessa, which can be related dialectically to the preceding painting but
which has a completely different form. Beginning from a female hand in a
ballet-like pose pointing upwards, floating freely above four parallel
horizontal nets, lines consisting of red, orange, and yellow are developed.
These are superimposed and form tangles only to then open out again into
new, soft areas forming moving wave-like forms. The lines remind us of the
fluttering of leaves as they fall from the trees in autumn and also, at a
distance, of the structures of chemical elements. In these works Gallo
captures something natural that is only rarely found with this intensity in
painting. Furthermore he shows that he is referring in some way to writings
by artists who have influenced the language of abstract art, such as Point,
Line and Surface by Vassily Kandinsky or the Notebook of Pedagogical
Sketches by Paul Klee.6
Perhaps Gallo is doing with great immediacy in painting what Paul Cézanne
stated when talking to Joachim Gasquet: “My method is one of hatred
towards the results of imagination; it is realism but, be quite clear about this,
a realism full of greatness, the heroism of truth.”7 He also stated: “He who
wants to create must fellow Bacon who defined the artist homo additus
naturae.”8 Cézanne further added: “However, painting nature does not mean
copying an object, but making impressions of colour – there exists a purely
painterly reality of things […] personally I wanted to copy nature, but I never
managed to do so, however I try to deal with it. I was satisfied with my work
when I discovered it had to be represented by way of something else. Nature
should not be reproduced, but represented. Through what? Through the
same values of colour … colour is biological, I would almost say it makes
things live by itself.”9 These thoughts by Cézanne culminated in this
statement: “Art is a harmony that runs parallel to nature. And this is how it
must be for the artist too, but only if he does not knowingly interact with it. All
his will must be annulled; he must leave aside his prejudices, forget, create
silence, compose a perfect echo. External and internal nature (and here he
knocked his head) must interpenetrate in order to last, to live, a life half
human and half divine, the life of art.”10
Memoria iconoclasta (Iconoclastic Memory). In 1986 during a visit to New
York, Gallo came across a series of portraits of well-known and less-known
scientists whose researches and discoveries have had a basic importance
for the development of today’s civilisation. The greater part of these are
“forgotten faces” because, while their studies have been accepted, never or
only rarely are they remembered in daily life, unless with the help of an
encyclopaedia.
In a similar way to that used for other paintings of his, Gallo created twelve
portraits of these scientists. At first he paints the faces in oils and then he
tears them into fragments and recomposes them in a collage-like way.
Encaustic technique, used for the background of the composition, in this
case too has a central role. The creative process consists more in giving a
plastic form than in a genuine painterly action.
Among others it is possible to recognise alienating images of Madame Curie,
of a botanist, of the inventor of the Morse code who was also a painter, but
also portraits of unknown women who had, however, a crucial role in society.
Gallo rescues from oblivion the faces of historical characters by fixing them
in paint and transforming them, in a fragmentary and iconoclastic style, into
pictures that allow us only “bits of memory”.
In this manner the artist makes us aware of the fundamental importance of
individual and collective memory, thanks to which we are able to move and
act in the world, above all in our present. In this sense the portraits reveal an
aim that, on the one hand, makes the painting enjoyable, and, on the other,
signifies that it is an element of subjective reality.
Istogramma (Histogram). In the last painting of this group of works,
Istogramma, Gallo joins together elements of science and technology taken
from nature or discovered by chance.
Two panels placed one above the other show a basic figurative structure
composed of vertical parallel lines in different colours. In the upper picture
almost all the lines have their origin lower down and they fade, at different
points, as they move upwards. In the lower one the structure of the lines is
mirrored symmetrically. Between the two, aggregates of colour are poetically
scattered reminding us of various kinds of leaves. The technique used is
again that of the works previously described.
In their layout the linear elements allude to the bar-codes of finance and
economics graphs, while the amorphous forms symbolise, on the contrary,
natural order and, therefore, an “other” order with respect to the first, one
composed of chance elements and of cyclic and rhythmic laws. With his
simple figurative means, Gallo condenses in this work what Heraclites
formulated some 500 years BC, in other words that the order of the world is
governed by diametrically opposite terms. “Nothing is possible without its
opposite.” With amazing imagination Gallo transfers this apparently simple,
though deeply meaningful, observation into a lyrical model of worlds that,
apart from the dichotomy between order and disorder, system and chance,
surface and space, or immobility and movement, present at the same time
numerous other meanings and content.
His work is in the widest sense comparable to the installations of the
American Minimalist Walter De Maria, based mostly on symbols and the
fundamental laws of mathematics which, however, include such chance
operations as, for example, those of the Chinese book of prophesies I Ching
though deprived of their original meaning so as to flow into a different order,
one consisting of unpredictable laws and factors.
With his Istogramma Gallo establishes a relationship between his sculptural
works, based on a serial typology and on the ability to be renewed
continually, and the paintings which use different compositional structures in
order to be able to express, in a figurative sense, knowledge of both a
natural order and of a subjective conception of reality. Gallo, through a
completely new language, manages in his work to revive that unity of nature
and culture that was once at the heart of ancient art.
R. L.
1. Only in 1998 was it possible for me to maintain my promise to Alighiero Boetti, who sadly
had died in 1994, to devote a big solo show to him in the Museum für Moderne Kunst,
Frankfurt. See the catalogue Alighiero e Boetti. Mettere al Mondo il Mondo, Museum für
Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 1998. Boetti was, in various ways, a model for Gallo and other
artists who were interested in the foundations of the world and of creativity.
2. A. Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, 1819, quotation from: Katalog
Innenleben, Städtisches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt, 1998, p. 110.
3. W. Benjamin in: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,
quotation from Ges. Schriften, Voll. 1 and 2, Frankfurt, pp. 477 et seq.
4 For this see also the video installation Tooba by Shirin Neshat. The theme is taken from a
story by the writer Shahroush Parsipour, Tooba and the Meaning of the Night. Tooba is the
mystic soul of the tree, represented in a symbolic way as a beautiful old woman. We see the
fine wrinkled face of an old lady, an integral part of the tree, and almost physically fused
with it.
5. Courbet’s picture The Origin of the World (1866), for many years believed to be lost and
finally found to have belonged to Jaques Lacan, is reproduced in: W. Hofmann, Courbets
Wirklichkeiten, in: Anhaltspunkte. Studien zur Kunst und Kunsttheorie, Frankfurt, 1989, p.
215.
6. Vassily Kandinsky, Über die Formfrage (On the question of Form), in: V. Kandinsky / F.
Marc, Der Blaue Reiter (1912), Munich, 1979; V. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche,
Bauhausbücher Vol. 9 (1926); Bern, 1969; P. Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch,
Bauhausbücher Vol. 2 (1925), Mainz, 1965.
7. Paul Cézanne in: J. Gasquet, Cézanne, Paris, 1921, cit. in: W. Hess, Dokumente zum
Verständnis der modernen Malerei, Hamburg, 1956, p. 17.
8. Paul Cézanne in: A. Vollard, Cézanne, Paris, 1915, cit. in: W. Hess, op. cit., p. 17
9. Ibid.
10. Paul Cézanne in: J. Gasquet, Cézanne, Paris, 1921, cit. in: W. Hess, op. cit., p. 17.
Rolf Lauter was deputy director of the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and,
between 2000 and 2002, he coordinated special cultural projects for the city. Since 2002 he
has been the director of the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. He has curated many exhibitions,
among which Views From Abroad: European Perspectives on American Art (Museum für
Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, and then the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,
1997); Alex Katz (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 1997); Alighiero e Boetti (Museum
für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 1998); Bill Viola (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Schirn
Kunsthalle, Rathaus Römer, Börse und Heiliggeistirche, Frankfurt, 1999); Lucian Freud:
Naked Portraits (Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2000), and then the shows devoted
to Herbert Hamak and Jaume Plensa to take place in the Mannheim Kunsthalle in 2005.
From 1989 to 1994 he was professor at the Philipps-Universität, Marburg, and since 2005
he has taught at Mannheim university. He has taken part in numerous conferences, and has
published various essays on contemporary art. He is also editor of the magazine “Positionen
der Gegenwartskunst”.
From: Giuseppe Gallo. mito-rito-sito, catalogo della mostra, Galleria dello Scudo, Verona, 2005,
pp. 17-22.