Curated by Agata Polizzi
“Life, the world, me, we are situations of energy.
The point is not to resolve these situations by crystallizing them
but by keeping them open, alive
in function and coincidence of our living.”
Giovanni Anselmo
The observations of processes that generate natural mutations, like the observation of human nature through simple gestures, are at the base of Michele Tiberio’s research. This personal documentation has to do with intimacy and silence, putting doubt before certainty, where waiting becomes the experience of time and the world.
A rigorous and scientific training mixed with an intimate and well-informed vision of the cultural identity from which he comes render Michele Tiberio’s works extremely precise and significant. His style is constructed on an Arte Povera matrix, where the marks and the physicality denote a tight bond with nature and its morphological elements. The artificial object is paired with a process anchored in time and space that is just as clear. Furthermore, he has the will to experiment with contemporaneity through a vision of his own lived life.
Sculpture is the medium that is most representative for Tiberio. It allows him to elaborate on the narration and the physicality of the material. The variation of heterogeneous materials in harmony with diversity is in a subtle and precarious equilibrium that does not look for perfection.
The final outcome is not achieved through control of the process, control that the artist purposefully lets go of, which he submits to, as a man in love would with his lover. He is knowingly at the mercy of chance, not wanting to set limits during any step of the way.
The process “first an foremost” is what counts, the unmeasurable beauty of risk, the liberty to let oneself be seduced by chance, remaining nonetheless vigilant under a system of disorderly self-control.
These elements are consistently found in Michele Tiberio’s work, nourished also by a vulnerability of character, shy and introverted, like the work. Together, they produce a clear and strong expressive nature that builds a conceptual and structural armour from the artistic language.
Vulnerability should not be confused with uncertainty. Rather, it should be thought of as a life experiment: a point of view that accepts compromise both as man and artist on the threshold of his own maturity. Tiberio draws on personal experience rather than collective to find meaning, and it is in this way that the references to and the distances between past models are abolished. In the new measure, taking into consideration another time, there is something incessantly changing.
In “(…) perhaps the whisper was born before the lips” every work holds memory and chance. Tiberio makes ample use of these themes, working with natural and synthetic materials, his personal memories, and “objects” as a stratification of content.
Dirty marks, lack of make-up, and authenticity hazily bring out the research, exertion, and thought.
Thus, the cement sculptures with iron inserts were born, along with the works in plaster, the fine strips of PET, works generated through selection processes and “planting” of materials that beyond their precise nature also have a symbolic and mnemonic value.
In his relationship with the material, the artist is able to free his internal world, charging it with a structural complexity equal to the density which drives his personal memory.
The title of the exhibition, a quote from Quasi leggera morte by Osip Mandel’ štam (Adelphi), is the detail of a stratification that excludes every pre-established link. It flows through ideas and sensations, emotions, choice that envelops long periods of time, circular, that explains how to go “everywhere and nowhere,” weaving in order to organize the thoughts that keep him alive.
“(…) perhaps the whisper was born before the lips” is, in this sense, the synthesis of a journey during which Michele Tiberio observed with respect and patience. He listened to himself in relation to the context, investigating in both cases processes of consciousness that gradually produced a more calculated language to represent his aspirations. Michele Tiberio thus opens the discussion by looking at the past as an essential element to interpret the present. With work that transcends time and place, he is energized and set in motion, fascinated by the contradictory challenge to the natural order.