Giuseppe Gallo’s pictures and sculptures have that air of morbid fragility, of esoteric irony, that we have come to expect from artists of the School of Rome. What makes Gallo’s works exceptional is the air of isolation that permeates his scenes and objects. It is not the morbidity itself that matters—that quality is evident even when the works blaze brightly, for the artist’s quasi-ecstatic use of color has to it the phosphorescence of a decaying infinity, the burst of color of a star that has exhausted its absoluteness—but the way it qualifies whatever is located within it. Through its mannerist elongation, the cast-bronze spoon of Untitled, 1989, seems to live its isolation, to breathe its aloneness. Similarly, Saturno, 1989, also of bronze but with a chromatic patina, exists in the absolute integrity of its aloneness, and the painting Untitled (Diptych), 1989, which seems lifted from Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia, 1514, has a marvelous starburst as its most esoteric and transfixing element. Over and over again, Gallo presents gestural shapes and figures in emblematic isolation. By virtue of this isolation the objects acquire a cabalistic character, as well as the ancientness of a fragment whose lost world we cannot begin to conceive. They in effect become archaic, almost archetypal.
But what is the content of their mystery, the substance of their strangeness? What do Gallo’s anonymous and not-so-anonymous figurines and objects—implicitly the measure of the void they inhabit, impossibly scaled into infinity, sometimes turbulently dynamic, sometimes statically vacant—signify? What does the space itself—at once macro- and microcosmic—mean? The total constellation of figure and space—compounded sometimes by panel doubling, implicitly expanding the space beyond any imaginable frame—signifies the borderline between consciousness and unconsciousness.
Gallo is a master of the sensation of the uncanny, so fundamental to our being but usually ignored. He gives us a sense of looking behind the scene of that which is innocently given—a color, an odd shape, an object, an open space-to see it wrench itself out of ordinariness. Through this process the object acquires symbolic import. The object exists in what has been called potential space—the utterly improbable but emotionally necessary space that is simultaneously private and public, a personal projection and an impersonal reality. Gallo’s works reconstitute this truly primordial space. Indeed, his careful installation of his works turned the gallery into a potential space—a kind of catacomb—in which each work is a memento mori of a transient state of mind.
—Donald Kuspit
