In a manner similar to the partnership between individuals in a relationship, evolving over time with varying intensity, energy, and passion, Michele Gabriele constructs a relationship between his works and the viewer. Here, we become partners in an unspoken narrative partly constructed by the author and partly expanded by our own imagination. We slowly explore the contours, surfaces, and layers with our eyes, attempting to feel and dream, to understand and approach the entire arc of the story both rationally and emotionally. However, all we have at our disposal is a fragment resembling the culmination of a dramatic situation, whose beginning and climax are buried in the depths of possible events. It is solely up to us how deeply we can immerse ourselves, how long we can hold our breath, and navigate its ambiguous boundaries. Simultaneously, everything relies on the degree of trust invested in our spectator consciousness through works as witnesses to the story—the more and stronger their impact, the closer we find ourselves as partners on the metaphorical trajectory of a mutual relationship.

 

The exhibition Walking Our Distance by Italian artist Michele Gabriele intentionally continues the narrative using mythologized references to a pre-apocalyptic world remarkably close to our own. Gabriele’s hypermaterial objects are distorted syntheses of countless forms that have existed in the past. Deliberately overwhelming our stereotypes with an overloaded visual imagination and with irony referring to the popcultural retro aesthetics of Hollywood films from the 1980s (from Ninja Turtles and Jurassic Park to Star Wars or The Dark Crystal), they speak to us from an uncertain reality of the future. Similar to his approach in sculpture, Gabriele applies a new technique in painting, considering it as an anonymized cluster of layers of all existing techniques and forms of this medium. He attempts to create a situation of antiauthorship or endless appropriation of forms, deliberately suppressing his own handwriting and calling it a portrait of painting. In essence, he approaches the method of creation that artificial intelligence employs in imagemaking.

 

The Prague exhibition follows the concurrently running exhibition of Michele Gabriele, I see you repeating this, I warn you in the sweetest way, at the Espai d‘Art Contemporani de Castelló gallery in Valencia, Spain.