ARCOmadrid 26: Michele Gabriele

For the solo booth at ARCO Madrid, presented by KALI Gallery, Michele Gabriele has selected works that reveal the core of his artistic research.The selection reflects his ability to construct images as unstable thresholds, activating an anamnesis of the present and challenging the assumption that perception is a neutral instrument of knowledge.

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

In 2nd July, the sculpture presents itself as an excessive, misaligned body, composed of silicone, resin, fabrics, plastic, graphite, and found objects. The accumulation is not decorative but produces a perceptual density, a kind of sensitive fog that suspends reading. The form appears as a hypothesis in tension: it shares the viewer’s “where” and “when,” but vibrates on a slightly offset space-time axis. The sci-fi element is not a stylistic reference but a narrative strategy: to inhabit the gaps of the story and delegate to the viewer the completion of the evoked universe. The presences establish mutual relationships, sometimes observing other works, structuring a mise en abyme of intersecting gazes. The closed eyes of the sculptures avoid direct vision while remaining exposed to it: a posture of conscious vulnerability.

The series 2nd July is inspired by a concrete and profoundly human event that deeply affected the artist. The tragedy occurred in Ravenna on July 2, 2011, during the Ravenna Festival, when a group of very young Kenyan performers was swept away by the waves. Marco Colombaioni, an artist and close friend of Michele Gabriele, present as a volunteer for the festival’s setup, bravely threw himself into the sea to rescue them. Defying danger, he managed to save two of the children, but while attempting to save a third, fifteen-year-old George Munyua Gathuru, he was overcome by the waters, sacrificing his life along with the boy’s in an act of selfless courage and human solidarity. This series, evoking the myth of Drexciya, symbolically recalls the deaths of migrants at sea, the thousands of people who lose their lives attempting to reach European shores in the hope of a better future, and reflects on vulnerability, risk, and the tension between fragility and courage.

 

With Portrait of a Parrot (2025), the same conceptual architecture is transferred into the pictorial domain. Here, the eyes are open. The figures do not withdraw from the gaze but intercept it, reflect it, complicate it. The canvas functions as a mirror surface: it does not reproduce a world, but returns the interiority of the viewer. If in 2nd July the body occupied space as an almost out-of-sync entity, in the portraits the parrot invades the scene hypertrophically, overshadowing the context meant to contain it. Kitsch and tragicomic in appearance, it emancipates from its decorative iconography and becomes a critical device: repeating without comprehension, simulating language without producing authentic meaning, embodying a collective vanity mitigated by subtle, ambiguous benevolence.

The series arises from a profound sense of inner distress developed over recent years, in response to the systemic indifference of politics and the art world toward daily suffering. From this sense of impotence emerges 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, linked to repetition and language, “speaks” without saying anything, symbolizing excess, aesthetic consumption, and exoticism reduced to ornament. Ubiquitous in the parks and skies of European cities, it always seems slightly out of place. The figures convey an inescapable inadequacy and seem aware of being observed, capturing the disorientation experienced before a mirror: a flicker of uncertain tenderness, a quiet pity for our solitude.

In 2nd July, the encounter between the parallel reality and the viewer’s reality coincides with the exhibition itself, a spatial threshold in which the work manifests; in Portrait of a Parrot, the convergence is concentrated on the surface of the canvas. On a symbolic level, a basic polarity emerges: the tritons of 2nd July belong to Water; the parrots embody Air. The exhibition thus becomes a point of intersection between heterogeneous elements, a space where separate universes come into contact. Sketches in which tritons and parrots meet prefigure a possible subversion and foreshadow interaction. In both cases, the image does not represent: it activates. It activates a space of friction where intimacy and alterity collide, and where vision, far from being transparent, reveals its constructed nature.

Through this work, Michele Gabriele demonstrates a remarkable ability to touch complex emotional depths while retaining the elegance and openness of a childlike sensibility. His poetry resides in the balance between sincerity and restraint, never exploiting situations rhetorically or redundantly, always allowing the viewer to encounter both wonder and reflection.