All details are given with an accuracy which is almost maniacal; at times, rather like a miniaturist from whom neither the vibrations that the continuous changes of the light make to colours, nor the incessant variations of surfaces and volumes designed in the space by the changes of the shadows that accompany them can escape – almost a desire to stop the unrepeatable appearance of a place of the world in the unrepeatable moment of the time when the observer is part of it. The landscape is urban, of these our towns at the end of the century, standardized and devastated by the aggression of cement and automobiles, crossed incessantly by anonymous crowds, driven along the same routes every day by some urgency postponed, by some indispensable external deadline. But neither in the faces of this crowd, nor in the results of their relentless labours do we see traces of the urban landscapes which, on the white fields of the great sheets on which Gabriella paints, crop up almost as a projection of her subconscious rather than the result of a meticulous observation, or of a subjective interpretation of what she observes. Her painting consists in the research, conducted with the passion of an archeologist for what has survived the great labours of that crowd, for what Milan Kundera defined the beauty by mistake: «Before disappearing completely from the world, the beauty will survive a little bit by mistake. The beauty by mistake is the last phase of beauty’s history. […] We can meet her only when the persecutors have forgotten her by mistake somewhere. The beauty is hidden behind the backdrop of the Mayday parade. If we want to find her, we must tear the canvas of the backcloth».
The canvas of a false backcloth is not as resistant as a forest of reinforced concrete columns implanted deep within the earth and shored up against each other. The endless stream of people who go daily to raise and shore them up is not the parade of people set once a year by a repressive State, but the sum of millions of free choices, freely renewed every day with the belief of living in the best possible way and the world. History has finally ripped the canvas backdrops of Mayday parades, but has multiplied those of stone, which make the places in which beauty survives less and less visible only because they have been forgotten by mistake. If in the watercolors of Gabriella these places are brought to light, it is because anything that prevents you from seeing them, from compacted barriers of cars to urban desecration, from the noise of the jostling crowd that pushes those who would like to pause to watch, come to her to be subjectively destroyed with a desperate act of inner will as in the famous final scene of film Zabriskie Point. There is no political significance in her artistic work, or complaints of a historical nature.. Her unease of living in a world that is increasingly conforming to the models imposed by a progress measured only in terms of economic growth and technological power, can be inferred by the almost total absence of the here and now in her paintings, a sort of removal, a desire to cancel from her visual horizon something that nevertheless looms there, leaving everywhere the unavoidable signs of its substantial transience and, paradoxically, of lasting permanence of its being: piles of rubble and car cemeteries around which survive tenacious presences of independent life.
In her paintings Gabriella rebuilds her world choosing and reassembling the fragments and survivals of the beauty by mistake beyond the space-time contest that engulfs them. The forms and the places where they appear, call to mind a game of subtle e-vocations and are reassembled regardless of their real location, in a new dimension of space and time in which the interiors mingle with outsiders, a single glance unifies multiple viewpoints, the layers of the past emerge in the present and overlap it without cancelling it out, different and distant temporal scanning synchronously merge into one. It is not a perfect world which she rebuilds, a shelter for the lonely and strangers, a new Utopia island. It is not a world dreamed of as a counterpoint to the real one. They are projections of her inner world, of her personal history and of her involvement in the collective history of the years in which she happens to live, of her unconscious and of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, which transfigure and loaded with symbolic meaning are an only apparently figurative artistic search.
A significant clue to this interlaced net between the individual dimension and the participation in the collective dimension I think we can infer from the fact that it is never the natural landscape which attracts her attention. In the exteriors the environments are changed and shaped by the work of human beings; in the interiors we find the workplaces of human beings. This isn’t only a consequence of her architectural studies grafted on artistic training. It is not only a projection of the manual work of the mason and master builder that substantiate the culture of the architect. This is focusing attention on the relationship between human beings and the world. It is, of course, the contemplation, the observation with sacred respect for the other from herself, which allows her to grasp its intrinsic perfection and not only to highlight the aspects that may arouse the interest of the beholder, but it is also human activity. It is the thought which guides the activity and enriches itself, it is the transmission and generational accumulation of knowledge. It is the ability to unite in a global vision meditated and calculated thought, to preserve the past without missing out on the present, to recompose the breach between the search for why and knowledge of how. That ability, nowadays lost, to join the moment of functionality with aesthetic, which allows not to put the “doing more and more as purpose of doing”, but the contemplation of “what has been done as purpose of well doing”.
This is what the paintings of Gabriella talk about to those who are not only captured by the charm of her landscapes, the purity of the lines and well balanced volumes, which articulate the spaces with the harmony of a musical score, by thin glazes of colour that materialize on the paper, places where the borders between the inside and outside are uncertain, where the architectural language finds profound consonance with the music and the colour of sound isn’t only an image; and a rhythm, a fugue, a crescendo, a nuance, a pianissimo, are perceived almost as a harmonization of the physicality of the world by the human hand, and we remain amazed that we have never been able to see in real places that she goes through with the lightness of Mercury, all that her art captures and makes us capture.
Maurizio Pallante
Italiano