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GABRIELE PICCO, Carrying a cloud

Exhibiting from March 22, 2025 at Gallery Hotel Art

Curated by Valentina Ciarallo

Lungarno Collection once again embraces and celebrates art with a new project that enriches its collection of collaborations. Since 2000, the Gallery Hotel Art at Vicolo dell’Oro 5 has fostered a creative dialogue between contemporary art, the people of Florence, and the hotel’s international guests. 

Gabriele Picco is a visual artist and writer who, in his versatile artistic journey, explores the paradoxical relationships between universal themes such as life and death, dreams and reality, focusing on the contradictions of humanity and contemporary society. One of the most recurring subjects in his works is clouds, an iconographic theme deeply rooted in art history, from Giotto’s 14th-century depictions, where clouds take on symbolic and narrative significance, to the dreamlike and surreal visions of René Magritte in the 20th century. Picco reinvents clouds by emphasizing their inherent contradiction and ambiguity—entities suspended between the tangible and the ephemeral, the real and the imaginary—evoking the artistic vision of Pasolini, as seen in the 1967 short film Che cosa sono le nuvole?, a frequent reference in his work. Clouds, understood as allegories of life, take on a poetic and surreal dimension, which the artist translates into sketches, drawings, sculptures, and writing. They appear as mystical, impalpable, and evanescent forms, with unusual and elusive shapes, evoking an infinite universe of possibilities. 

On one hand, we see them associated with the historic Fiat 500, a timeless icon. The people’s car—accessible to all, embodying an era and a lifestyle—transforms into a giant sculpture. A cream-colored 1964 Fiat 500 D model carries on its roof rack, instead of suitcases, an impossibly large cloud. The work Nuvola evokes a nostalgic Italy, hopeful and full of collective dreams. An imagery that belongs to the past yet is not too distant. Nuvola, in its various versions, has traveled the world, making stops in iconic squares and locations, spreading the charm of Italy’s economic boom era. As the artist notes, clouds are among the first images we learn to draw as children, along with houses and the sun, recalling the lightness and carefree nature of childhood that art can restore to the adult gaze. 

Among the many pictorial variations he has created, there is the new series Cieli bucati (Pierced Skies). Here, clouds stand out against horizons shifting from shades of pink, blue, and purple at dawn to the fiery reds of sunset, vibrating under the passage of light like in Monet’s en plein air paintings. The punctured and perforated canvas transcends the limits of pictorial space, opening up to new dimensions. A small bird perches on the frame (a vintage one, repurposed by the artist), creating a bridge between past and present. The Pierced Skies series recalls the constellations of Lucio Fontana’s “holes,” openings into an expanded space in search of a third dimension, as well as Gabriele Picco’s own novel Cosa ti cade dagli occhi (2010), in which a seagull discovers the Achilles’ heel of the sky: a fragile point that, if pecked, could shatter, revealing a tiny glimpse of the wonder of the unknown. This symbolic gesture represents the ability to transform reality and find that crack through which to access an idealized world. 

According to Picco, clouds do not simply float; they must also be tamed. Hence emerges the figure of the “cloud tamer,” a curious character in the “theater of life” we experience every day. Like a conductor with a top hat, he directs a symphony of dreams amid the clouds to compose an ethereal harmony. In Paint Your Life, within the same surreal dimension, a whimsical little man appears, seemingly emerging from an absurdist theater: his deformed head becomes a palette, the very one used to color one’s own existence. Perhaps an invitation to paint life following one’s aspirations, imprinting dreams and infinite possibilities. 

Less recent works, such as Rainbow Transporters and The Carrot Climber (2017), are being exhibited for the first time. Here, we encounter an imagery where an intangible beauty—such as that of rainbows—becomes earthly: two tiny men choose where to place the bridge of color. Is it an antidote to boredom? Or perhaps a desire to look at the world with wonder while climbing a giant carrot? 

The exhibition, enriched by a series of ironic drawings inspired by the popular culture of cartoons and created especially for the occasion, transforms into a space for reflection on the concept of eternity, exploring dimensions beyond our reach that become metaphors for the experiences of every individual. 

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