The critic and historian of classical art has so far got used – and the same was in the last forty and fifty years and will be in the future- to notice that artists distinguish themselves by choosing a special niche in which they can give free play to their personal style. The result of this attitude has been that many artists have thought in a really innovative way only for a few years, and fortunately maybe, since, were it different, we would have had too many of them. A long time has been necessary for them, considering their importance, to find their own peculiar style.
Once they found it, they have repeated it quickly since certain economic guarantees were bound to it. Such a destiny was not allowed to those artists who, maybe luckily, died before that. I’m thinking to Schiele, but also to Raphael, Van Gogh etc…
As for our artist, such remarks are of a certain account, right because considering the experience of Gabriele Giorgi’s works starting only from a visual perspective wouldn’t bring us too far. As if to say that we wouldn’t recognize him anymore. The observer would hardly perceive the style, the way of writing of this figurative artist .He must respect and know that he’s handling with an artist who wants to give movement to the landscapes, who stops for a while at the borderland right because it is at the extreme edges of the aesthetic geography that you can make new experiences. This overcoming of the borderlines, which newly change when walked down , because in that point they met new landscapes, has become the distinctive sign of this artist.
In an era in which we should understand how important it is to learn to know the Other, in order not just to handle with him to obtain a profit, but to understand and accept him in his own cultural and religious sphere, Gabriele’s works exert a call to the aesthetic tolerance. The concept itself of aesthetic tolerance shows that the aesthetic Avant-garde as a concept must not be denied, but it isn’t at the centre of the interest anymore. We are not working from safe stands anymore but, in such a globalized world, as the Postmodernists’ or the Decostructivism’s, we are trying to offer a new expression, the new Structuralism’s one, just to remember further developments of the Abstractism.
This conception of Giorgi’s works is neither theorical nor philosophical. The artist himself wouldn’t recognize it as such, since any kind of new theories and concepts would limit him in his search for solution to new problems. Giorgi thinks to the specific space-time-work of art. In the past, the artists concentrated only on the relevance of the specific work of art. Giorgi takes all the freedoms that our fast mediation allows – Gutenberg has never been as fast as today. You can deduct this from the titles, determine it from the different materials, from his search for the most various open spaces, that you can fill with art in order to make them cultured.
The works of art are made of the most different materials, with a particular preference to stone and steel, both for the hardness that comes from nature and for what today is made solid by fire but shaped by human work. The author proposes himself both antithetically and in rows and heaps. The single piece has been abandoned more than once in favour of discussion of single artistic pieces which “talk to each other” in the work of art, throw balls to themselves, ask questions to each other in order to be able to answer as an “ensemble”. This is valid for works as Borea, 1997, Rinserrata,1992, Soglia del Tuono ( Thunder Threshold),1993, or Aria del Temporale (Thunderstorm air),1993, a little less, but still as an example, it is valid for Comressivo III, 1995, surely already conceived in the great work Prue ( Stems ), 1989. Thanks to this, you feel that the artist perceives an internal coherence that must not be visually followed. He knows his own possibilities which broaden but don’t repeat.
It is probably peculiar that he studied Xylography at Urbino Institute of Art. Here he learnt a technique which can be continuously revised, which must be invented again if you want to reach different results. Setting himself free from the xylography means, he has been able to use freely all the materials, bringing together the experience of the new creations: the material participates in the shape. So it is not “ form follows function” but “form follows material”. This is valid for all the works, from the beginnings to nowadays, to works as Anima ( Soul), 2000, or Sone, 2001. The artist projects his fantasies in the so called classical medium of drawing and invention. He constructs models which are then reworked in broader dimensions. In his latest phase he makes use of experts, craftsmen because he feels he’s not like them. He’s a conceiver, an inventor. He can make proposals which are very individually made on a small scale, but must be done again by somebody else in the new monumental dimension. It is important that the artist sets his own hand and then corrects and define the refines and the surface.
Giorgi is an indefatigable, mutable artist, who always looks for new solutions, a bystander full of ideas, continuously in search for challenges. Divided between seriousness and irony, between the steadiness of the material and its overcoming between the precision of a certain space and its own break-up. Cold and warmth, sky and water, earth and nature are all elements which play a role. Alessandro Pitrè talks about signs of strength. As the Alois Riegl wrote in 1904, the change is implicit in the work of art and in the artistic will. The works are not theological but theologically oriented. The artist sees his task in putting our creative knowledge in contact, so that purely aesthetic objects may be born, but also those of an urban aestheticism with a value of use are right as those of an interiorised dialogue.
Giorgi writes about connections, connections of objects which don’t belong to each other; he writes about contents which actually are not related to each other, but which assume a great importance,in the contest, right because this is the laboratory in which asking questions about the experimentation is a necessary premise.
Giorgi knows the necessity of these premises. Doing that, he submits himself to one of the principles of the Avant-garde . It is maybe this bond which takes his works away from the great global production of a “fast food” aesthetic, since everything Gabriele Giorgi invents, what he puts in the world as an invention, must be taken seriously, as a strong need of his.
This seriousness is not for his own choice, but it is a reflection, as Herman Hesse used to say, that the artist is a homo ludens par excellenz, who has got the task, given directly from God, of changing again and continuously. The results are interesting especially where the degree of abstraction increases and the nature of encounter of the numbers comes closer. Giorgi knows this glass pearls game well. He sets out his own rules to find his freedom, in order to grant the freedom of art together with it .Here are the roots of his will as an artist.
Dieter Ronte, Bonn, November 2001