Supernatural

With the works on display at the Umberto Di Marino Gallery the artist has attempted to set up a process of ex- change between people and different perspectives: it is a project in which problems linked to marketing, industrial design and contemporary productive dynamics become the form and substance of conceptual formulation. In the first room, a sign taken from a shop selling pet food opens the exhibition with a superimposition of forms, seemingly bereft of logic, caused by the cramming together of stickers of pet food suppliers over the years. Tibaldi therefore adopts the device of barter, taking a spontaneous aesthetic result from a specific peripheral area and giv- ing it new formal dynamics, creating a sign as a replacement for the removed one.

The concept is extended to a more complex context at the end of the exhibition itinerary in the installation supernatural, the production of a perfectly functioning prototype of a bathroom inspired by observation of the life of a Roma community. A system used to overcome the problem of running water, given the absence of a water sys- tem, is taken as a model for a design object which acquires all the characteristics of a luxury good. The resin and the accurate phase of post-design create a new product which, while maintaining its original inspiration in the use of recycled materials, transcends its original appearance and is transformed into an aesthetic module. Neverthe- less, this initial development brings with it another consequence: contextualised within a gallery, the design object abandons its own functionality and rises to the status of a work of art thanks to conceptual cross-reference. In the second room the video-advertisement of supernatural, made in conjunction with the artistic duo Bianco-Valente, plays on a similar ambiguity and offers a new challenge that aims to create a comparison and ex- change of roles and functions: it is a reflection on the idea of relations, not the common notion upon which social relationships are constructed on a daily basis but the one upon which every authentic collaborative relationship is based. In this exhibition, it represents a collective effort of interpenetration into the needs of the other person: the effort of several artistic individualities and a gallery communicating between them and with the outside world, that of craftspeople who pit themselves against highly unusual forms of logic, and that of a sponsor like Nabilah whose support is not just restricted to providing an economic contribution but also to offering collaboration during the design phase.