Recently opened their exhibition in Florence’s Not A Museum, ‘The Vernal Age of Miry Mirrors’, curated by Treti Galaxie, Michele Gabriele challenges the very primordial human mechanisms that we all share: 11 sculptures and 4 videos understand a cryptic imagining of different gestures and varying references to the layered manner in which human cognition can react to daily imagery. The consideration and close inspection of distance functions as heart of the exhibition, where Michele Gabriele interrogates the liminal space between the digital and physical in the eye of the spectator.

‘I’m sitting here on the ground so I'll remember it as a nice atmosphere/The difficulties of a form to move away from the stereotypes it evokes’, proclaims human figures masked in what are presumably VFX sweatsuits, interacting with various bestial and uncanny forms that could either precede or succeed human existence. Most intriguingly, the rigorous details and coherence in materials homogenized by earthy colours of moss, sand, and ores brings the spectator to reach for their own conclusions.

You define your work as post-digital hyper-materialism, how does the term couple with your works? Artistically and culturally.

I have tried to give a definition for what I believe is a trend in my work but also widespread in my opinion in several artists of my generation. It is a temporary term, I hope someone will soon catch what I have noticed and give it a better name.

I first noticed it in Europe and then also in America and now in Asia too. I understand it as an internalised post-digital consciousness and at the same time a great need for tactile perception, for physicality. It is being in the middle. It is a question of the gaze. Those who have this gaze recognise themselves. You want a physical object but you already see it as a PNG, you need a certain material and you imagine it as a texture of a render.

It is a physical and almost nostalgic desire but it starts from a more digital point of view.

It's not about a fascination with the aesthetics of the digital or the Internet, it's more of an internal thing a consciousness of the world. It is a story told in reverse. It is about those artists who often grew up not in big cities but with a European or international consciousness, those artists with the wrong accent, those who do not know how to behave, how to dress, those who are always out of place.

Having showed your latest solo show “The Vernal Age of Miry Mirrors” in Florence’s N.A.M., what are important lessons you’ve learned as a fine artist making in a widely digital age?

What I have learnt, or rather what has been confirmed to me by this project is that in a time like this, art should not forget to provide a stratification of meanings.

The audience is sometimes a very distant being and sometimes a very close one. Lately, I really appreciate it when a project allows an audience with different degrees of attention to relate to it, and in which there is a feeling of being able to dig deep.

Though the relationship between artist, subject, and viewer is vital across your artistic narratives, are there any moments in the process that become hedonistic?

The aesthetics of my works, and also the references, are instrumental for me in expressing certain concepts. I have never seen it from this point of view because the aesthetics of my works and the references they are filled with, is a double-edged sword and sharply divides the audience, the reasons why someone might love my work are the same reasons why someone else might hate it, or might feel rejected from.

I do not deny that a form of hedonism could belong to the making in general or to artistic creation whatever form it takes.

Because hypothetically it might make the artist feel very good to know that they have done something potentially relevant or memorable. But I don't think it is the centre of the matter especially as far as my work is concerned.

I say this because it is by no means obvious that I personally appreciate the aesthetics or references I offer. I use them because they seem to me the most appropriate or sometimes the least appropriate and I often make decisions that are far from my taste (if I still have one).

I don't follow sports much but this example comes to mind: The goal of a football player, could represent several things to them personally as an individual. But above all we care about what this goal represents for the team, the league and whatever else.

How do you recognize the importance of your language in terms of materials and the process of assemblance?

Materials and assemblages are often useful for me to emphasise a certain relationship between the observer and the observed. Sometimes trying to guide the experience. Suggesting to the spectator to move closer and further away and hypothesising the best choreography they can perform.

Your series of sculptures, "I'm sitting here on the ground so I'll remember it as a nice atmosphere/The difficulties of a form to move away from the stereotypes it evokes" are atavistic, bestial and post-apocalyptic all at once, what are the distinct references you researched or interrogated?

The artworks in this series are for me an hypothesis of what might happen to a form when it is observed, and I made them trying to make them the sum of all the details and distractions that a form can contain and suggest.

I wanted to formalise the difficulty in relating to something new and for this I chose to superimpose multiple layers of references to things that could be alien to everyone's daily life but at the same time very familiar.

Shared experiences, atavistic memories. Many of the aesthetic references I chose to evoke belong to things we may have seen, that become meanfull for our identities but not really experienced. They belong to our experience as spectators.

That is why they almost all come from films or cartoons and from very different eras and genres. I think it is more important for once to explain why than to make an always partial list of what you can recognise in my work as references and imagery, but if you recognise something specific in my work from an aesthetic point of view then that thing is there and it is probably desired.