Gabriele Giorgi exhibits as a painter, sculptor and designer.
Lindenthal – Reality is a process. And this process is, first and foremost, a material and plastic event, which is determined by an infinite transformation. This means: known shapes are continually varied and new shapes are created, intelligible and less intelligible, and many of them are very mysterious. It is this process to which the sculptor Gabriele Giorgi applies himself. He seeks in marble the rotund and pointed tendencies of creation which the natural material offers. Or else, he seeks to impose the shape of a ball on the stone in order to introduce the will and precision of human work among the things of the world.
He makes aluminium sheets follow an undulating or pulsating form, and solidifies the moment of a flowing movement into a sculpture. Or he uses gilded rods to create an exaggerated chair and a cupboard, an ensemble of objects which brings to life the riddle of our nocturnal dreams in the midst of our daily life. The artist, who was born in Montegaudio in 1953, is now putting all this on show at the Italian Cultural Institute.
The scope of his theme is huge: the exhibition deals with “tears”, with the “luck of the mad” and with “forgetting oneself”. Like many sculptors, Giorgi is also an excellent designer. He works with broad and generous lines plaster, and his gestures have a large and generous lightness. Like independent sheets which transform the miracle of the energy of life into a trail of lines and colours, his drawings are also studies for his work as a sculptor. In drawing, it is possible to be freer than in the process of creating a sculpture, which is tied to the heaviness of the material. In drawing, it is sometimes even possible to avoid the force of gravity. Between the self-assured lightness of his drawings and the precise steadfastness of his sculptures, Giorgi’s painting on canvas creates a kind of mediation.
In planes of controlled structure the artist shows us that, notwithstanding the freedom of possibilities, the “open process of reality” is completed in the form of irrevocable models. Into these models and these constant creations, in principle all our liberties and transformations are finally resolved. Even in the greatest confusion we cannot lose the order of the world. This is the calming conviction which Giorgi enables us to see with his works. The disturbing conviction is that if we nevertheless feel like this, we have not lost the world, but have lost ourselves
(Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, Thursday 21 August 2008)