Works section

INTRO

Gambino […] walked the difficult path of rejection of the dominant artistic experiences – following, however, their developments in the place in which they flourished – along a direction that few critics accepted to do not call “retro”, not foreseeing the future changes, after which the realisms would have become synonyms of “advanced research” (in this period we no longer talk about “avant-garde”).

Nor he hesitated to alternate progresses and comebacks, or catch of fresh air and reconsiderations and moments of nearly reverie.

Never abandoning, however, the will of gaiety, grace, equilibrium, harmony, gentleness; finally, the will of that kindness that seems to me expressed in every tract.

One finds the most genuine spontaneity in works that stud Gambino’s opera omnia.

First of all in the “macchiette”, which are those little figures inserted in a landscape, or rather, in his case, in a outlined fragment of landscape […]. Also in the places that belonged to him: the countryside he saw in his adolescence, almost exiled in Emilia. That Venice where Gambino, enraptured by the city, would create his personality as a painter; and Spain, where he migrated during the cold periods as a prestigious guest.

Reacting, everywhere, as an individual who suffered, and much. Who lived side by side with death when, as a young boy, he buried the victim of the war that destroyed the places all around. Never depicting, then, the scenes of the experienced horrors, but letting flourish, on the contrary, his desire of brightness, searching it even in the magic “place that is not there”, the ou-tópos, the utopia. If anything, redefining, softening and flavouring the sense of everyday life. As if from that agony would birth in him the need to spread life, Gambino reached to a cheerful painting, to discover – as Pietro Zampetti realised, writing about it in the opening of its first catalogue – “the humanity of monuments, [… as] a message of experienced events, interpreting their sentiment of time”. “Who lies behind Gambino?” the historian also asked to himself. “Nobody” he concluded. And, for being no one there, it is unquestionable the originality of his works; In every one of them it is recognisable his personal touch. It is attributable only to him the graphic dryness, the thick backdrops whit their colour ploughed by spatulas realised expressly for him, the manner of streamlining the gothicism and amplifying the Baroquism. . It is attributable only to him that self-portraying in many faces – gaunt, serious, drafted – of different figures: “even if it is declared the existence of only one self-portrait, already published in the first volume”, suggests who lived nearby him. Self-portraits of a puny man. apparently slender, but made of stone. Strong, determined. Kind at the same time.

It is also attributable to him the anxiety of squashing the subjects into his works, pushing the figures towards the borders, especially the upper one. As for the battlements of baroque palaces, the skyline of a landscape, the tip of a policeman’ hat and the hemisphere of a little priest, the beam used as a keystone for a cupola, the pinnacle of a bell tower. A pressuring toward the outside of the painting, not for lacking of pictorial space but for a metaphoric, irrepressible impulse to break the limits, to explode, to breath the air of that beyond.

Ennio Pouchard

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