October 2014

These are some photographs from Giuseppe Gabellone’s exhibition at the Greengrassi gallery in south London. This gallery was difficult to find as it was in a housing estate – not exactly where I was expecting it to be. The exterior of the gallery was painted black, contrasting with all of the other regular red brick houses around it and you had to ring a bell to be let in. Going through the entrance it reminded me somewhat of a stable, lots of large doors and concrete floor, the exhibition itself was very sophisticated in comparison.

Up some creaky wooden steps was where we found Gabellone’s exhibition. This consisted of a large red blanket spread over the floor with two graph like pencil drawings on the wall, these drawing were immaculate, so precise that it almost created an optical illusion to look at. To approach the drawings we had to walk on the massive padded blanket, this made the space feel warm and homely. It was very difficult not to run or lie down on it as it felt so nice on the foot. From a distance the drawings were very faint as they were only drawn in pencil, it was only when you looked more closely that you could see how very detailed they were. One of the drawings was done in blue, orange, black and pink. Because the blanket was red it brought out all of the contrasting colours, so the blue and black marks were very vivid.

The scene that I pictured in my head as I was looking at his work was as though there had been a very stressed out maths or physics student sitting in this room working out some intense equation. I imagined him sitting there all night in his pyjamas, wrapped up in this massive duvet drawing these fanatically precise lines in order to find a solution to his problem.

As the gallery was very quiet, besides my friend and myself there was nobody there bar the people who were running the exhibition, I think that this was better as it helped me appreciate the space and also you could look at the entirety of it without your view being blocked by other on lookers.

Gabelone is an Italian artist who has done multiple exhibitions at Greengrassi. Looking at his work there is a common denominator- although he works a lot with sculpture as well as drawings he usually will put a blanket or a sheet of fabric on the floor or falling from the walls to the floor. As his work is commonly situated on the walls, it takes away the blandness from the white washed floors and the colours of the fabric bring out the colours in his work. It also means that the space is filled, making it feel warmer and more homely. As if he wants you to feel comfortable looking at his work, as if he wants you to feel like you never left your house.

In some aspects what Gabellone has created is similar to some of the Land Art of Michael Heizer. This may be a widely disagreed statement, however his use of contrasting line with texture I find very similar. Heizer has created some very precise line work by sculpting into the ground – sand, grass and so on. Gabellone has created his line work on the wall and contrasted it with the texture on the floor, where as Heizer has created his work directly into the texture.

What he has created is interesting- juxtaposing the expanse and loudness of the padded rug with the delicate, cold mathematic drawings. As I have talked about previously, for me this exhibition created a scene. I fashioned a story around this work which made it more interesting to me.                                          Although I understand where he was going with the delicate lines, it would have been interesting to see his work to either be bigger or the lines thicker. This is just because they felt a distant and disconnected to the piece. I am personally a fan of dynamic hard hitting work, work where you can zone out and let your mind wander through the piece – hence why I am such a big fan of performance pieces.

I would really like to see him create a performance piece based on these drawings. To create either a film or a live performance of him actually drawing the lines- to see how he would deal with his mistakes, to see him carefully measuring out the lines.

His work is a very different style to mine; I mostly work with film and 2D creating lots of messy pieces of work. I think that I can definitely take some things from this exhibition though – for example the use of the floor in work to bring out colours and utilize the space, and also the fact that delicate does not necessarily mean boring