In the exhibition: The extended gaze, in the depth of a reflection, Michele Gabriele has created a new series of works that explore the states that exist between the viewer: the one who observes and the artwork: the subject of the observation. Gabriele’s works seek to fluctuate between these two states. They play with the movements the viewer makes in the art space: how they look at sculptures and paintings, and how the art space itself shapes our perception of the works.

At Cantina, Gabriele has installed a generic, gray carpet that could be found in any institution and painted the central pillars of the room in the same color. The carpet considerably resembles the carpet that was in Cantina’s premises when it was taken over as an office space, and which has since been replaced with a smooth, concrete floor that is more suitable for the art space. Now the carpet has found its way back as a dogma the artist has willingly imposed on themselves to work with.

Inspired by the early landscape paintings that moved into homes and became a window to another view, Gabriele’s works reach for the sensation of sinking into a painting. At first glance abstract, covered in rapid strokes, they bring to mind the works of post-war abstract expressionists such as Cy Twombly’s charcoal doodles or Joan Mitchell’s paintings of fierce paint gestures. Behind the strokes, transparent layers of sky, landscapes, horizons, jewelry, eyes and animals emerge.
In the works, Gabriele has used hundreds of photographs of landscapes, which are digitally merged in transparent layers, until new contexts and shapes emerge. These images form a starting point for the paintings, which follow and continue the shapes of the landscapes. The lines, which are exaggeratedly drawn out as an abstract signature in the corner and the painted details that imitate a reflection, as if the paintings were behind a glass frame, draw us out again from the immersion in the image and back to the surface, the texture, the materiality of the work.

For the opening of this exhibition, the performance Distracted and Deleterious will be staged, which is part of the Egolatra series.
In the performance, the performer is cloaked in a costume, threadbare and armored, appearing as if a giant or god from a distant time has stepped out of the bog they have been buried in. The giant’s presence in the room is similar to that of the viewer, but takes place in an extended perception of time, where the movements become breaks from long moments of stillness and where the performer and its costume try to escape the performance and become a sculpture instead. In this act, the performance embodies both the state of observing and the state of being observed at the same time.