ARCOmadrid 26: Michele Gabriele

 For the solo booth at ARCO Madrid, KALI Gallery presents a selection of works by Michele Gabriele from the series 2nd July and Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context., which condense the core of his artistic research over the past years. 

Gabriele’s series, 2nd July and Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context., do not constitute two separate chapters, as might appear at first glance, but rather two articulations of the same urgency: to make the image a precarious threshold between presence and projection, subject and object, vision and counter-vision. In both cases, the work functions as a conceptual device capable of activating an anamnesis of the present, questioning the assumption that perception is a neutral instrument of knowledge. 

In 2nd July, the sculptures appear as excessive, misaligned bodies, made of silicone, resin, fabrics, plastic, graphite, and found objects. Here, accumulation is not decorative but becomes perceptual density, a kind of sensitive fog that suspends comprehension. Form appears as a narrative hypothesis in tension: it shares the viewer’s “where” and “when,” yet vibrates along a slightly displaced space-time axis. The science-fictional element is not a stylistic reference, but a narrative strategy: to inhabit the gaps in the story and delegate to the viewer the completion of the evoked universe. The works establish reciprocal relationships, sometimes observing each other and structuring a mise en abyme of interlaced gazes. The sculptures’ closed eyes avoid the viewer’s gaze, while remaining exposed, they assume a posture of conscious vulnerability. 

The series 2nd July is inspired by a tragic event on July 2, 2011, which profoundly marked the artist. During the Ravenna Festival, a group of young Kenyan performers visiting the sea was swept away by the waves. Marco Colombaioni, artist and friend of Michele Gabriele, managed to save two of them, but in attempting to rescue the fifteen-year-old George Munyua Gathuru, he was overcome by the current, losing his life along with the boy in an extraordinary act of courage and solidarity. 

The series also, by evoking the myth of Drexciya, symbolically recalls the dramatic maritime route of migration and the story of the thousands of people who lose their lives attempting to reach European shores, reflecting on vulnerability, risk, and the tension between fragility and courage. 

With Portrait of a Parrot (2025), the same conceptual strategy shifts to painting. Here, the eyes are open. The figures do not evade the gaze but intercept it, reflect it, and complicate it. The canvas functions as a mirroring surface: it does not reproduce a world but seeks and returns the viewer’s interiority.

If in 2nd July the body occupied space as an almost out-of-sync entity, in the portraits of Portrait of a Parrot. An Unbothered, Sad, and Cringe Parrot. Indifferent to its Context., the parrot invades the scene here and now, hypertrophically, overshadowing the context meant to contain it. Kitsch and tragicomic in appearance, the subject emancipates itself from its decorative iconography and becomes a critical device: the parrot repeats without understanding, simulates language without producing authentic meaning, embodying a collective vanity tempered by subtle and ambiguous benevolence. 

The series emerges from a profound inner unease developed over recent years in response to the systemic indifference of politics and the art world. From this sense of impotence arises the urgency to break the silence, showing not the suffering of others, but the vanity, discomfort, and embarrassment of our own gaze: a portrait of our indifference. The parrot, ubiquitous in parks and skies across European cities, always appears out of place to our eyes. These subjects convey their inadequacy as well as ours and seem aware of being observed, capturing the fleeting disorientation one sometimes feels in front of a mirror: a moment of uncertain tenderness and a silent compassion for our own solitude. 

In 2nd July, the encounter between the work’s parallel reality and the viewer coincides with the exhibition display itself; in Portrait of a Parrot, this convergence instead focuses on the surface of the canvas. 

Symbolically, an elemental polarity emerges: the tritons of 2nd July belong to water, the parrots embody air. The space that hosts them becomes a point of intersection between heterogeneous elements, a place where separate universes come into contact. 

In both cases, the image does not represent but activates. It activates a space of friction in which intimacy and alterity collide, and where vision, far from being transparent, reveals its constructed nature. Through these series, Michele Gabriele once again demonstrates the ability to touch complex emotional depths while maintaining the elegance and openness of an almost childlike sensitivity. His poetics lies in a balance between sincerity and restraint, avoiding rhetorical exploitation of situations or indulgence in redundancy, always leaving the viewer, who is made responsible, the possibility to encounter wonder and reflection.