Gabriel Ribeiro
Gabriel Ribeiro is an artist based in Lisbon, Portugal
Gabriel Ribeiro is one of ArtConnect’s Artists to Watch '21.
Gabriel Ribeiro's practice frequently explores the possibility for dialogue between video, photography and sculpture, while embracing frictions that erupt in their articulation. Through these mediums, he has been concerned with a kind of liminal tension present in ambiguous states where meaning can be sustained, dissolved, or created anew. This speculative approach is activated by a series of devices that summon a certain obscurity from the material world, capable of producing unintelligible effects, often classified as monstrous.
Silicones, agar-agar, wax and petroleum jelly are key substances that act both as signifiers and performers of this capacity to transform, decay or develop. By embracing speculation his practice refuses to outline a definitive solution to particular interrogations. Instead, it lays out a series of propositions that seek to gape at, critique and re-imagine humanity's relation to nature and the supernatural.
Radu Sticlea
Curator
“We find ourselves in environments that can come across as cold and blinkered. From agar art to micro-historical topics, Gabriel Ribeiro’s work embraces the fragile frontier between nature and artifice through biomorphic structures composed of both organic and inorganic matter.”
ArtConnect asked the winning artists to share with us a glimpse into their creative life to get a sense of their personal inspiration and artistic process.
How did you get started as an artist?
I have a formative memory of when I was 9 years old and began using my mother's video camera to film actions inside impromptu dioramas. I was fascinated by the possibility of isolating the mise-en-scéne in order to create specific illusions on screen. Whether by using fans to create windy scenes or a dimmer light to forge fade-in-out effects, I believe I was already using the camera as a way of discovering the physical world, its materialities, its surfaces and its potential. A way of reaching matter without necessarily touching it. That is something I still incorporate in my practice, where materials are frequently swallowed by a lens and come out the other end.
How would you describe your artistic approach?
It often begins with a focus on material, what it can or can't do, what it can or can't ''cause'' on a phenomenological level. After this initial encounter with worldly matter, the surfaces of things and images become somewhat ripe, oozy and ready to be peeled, soaked, submerged, dilated. So what I try to do is facilitate these processes connecting the skin of film - flat and mediated - to the skin of raw matter, which is definitely there and moist. The word ''haptic'' is used a lot but I guess that's what it's doing, creating moving images that are tactile and defiant of the constraints of the screen and want to get out. On the other hand, the sculptures seem to surrender to some sort of puddle-screen-like flatness.
Gabriel’s studio
Where do you look for sources of inspiration?
I'm inspired by colliding limits and perceived in-betweens, by murkiness and speculation. There is a passage in Microbe Hunters, a book by Paul de Kruif, where the author is recounting the invention of the microscope by spectacle maker Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek: ''without his incessant grinding of his own marvelous lenses he might have looked till he grew old without discovering any creature smaller than a cheese-mite. You have read that he made better and better lenses with the fanatical persistence of a lunatic; that he examined everything, the most intimate things and the most shocking things, with the silly curiosity of a puppy.''
What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced as an artist?
Focus and funding.
Gabriel Ribeiro at work in his studio
David Revés
Curator
“Gabriel Ribeiro's work is surprising for its conscious hybridity and bionic character, revealing a thought that seeks to synthesize systems, materials, bodies, and images from different origins and scales. His work finds a powerful radicality — although not always evident to us — between the natural world and the artificial (that is to say — the world constructed by the human). In his works, we move through different fields and lines of force, exploring dichotomies such as contemporary/archaic, human/machine, organic/inorganic, micro/macro, visible/invisible. Sometimes this opposition is more clinical, sometimes more poetic, opening a path for an enchanting relationship with ‘the Real’ where the artist constantly rehearses and renews a different and potent ecology for the relationship we establish with the world.”
Describe a typical day in the studio or where you make your work.
A typical day in the studio would involve testing out materials, making molds, prototyping for large-scale pieces, assembling objects in space in order to rehearse installations, packing works for travel. It might also involve piri-piri peanuts or getting my hands sticky from inadvertently touching uncured silicone rubber, running errands to track down a shower joint that could double as a wall fixture for a sculpture. That is to say, a typical day is often when something doesn't work, and then I have to find a way of making it work.
Is there a medium, a process, or a technique that you haven't used in your work yet but would like to try out?
A work that involves a cumulative process unfolded through a specific stretch of time, something repetitive and meditative. Could be painting, a durational performance or a sculpture with many small parts.
What are you currently working on and what’s coming up next for you?
I have just begun working on a solo show which will take place in March 2022 at Duplex Gallery in Lisbon.
Naz Cuguoğlu
Curator
“Gabriel Ribeiro’s works resemble sceneries from a post-apocalyptic future. Within his mixed-media installations, tubes carry mysterious materials from one side to the other, steel doors separate without much clue about what to keep apart, and materials hang in the air, building tension in the space. Symbols featured on heat-resistant silicone rubbers and laser engraved glasses, or solar prints on paper come together to form a language that is beyond time and space.
Liquid Picture I features a series of photographs that are printed on silicone to suggest an image-making that is almost liquid, fluid, and otherworldly. Beached, Blue, Bloated presents forms resembling molecules in a tube to echo the significance of Haraway’s chthulucene, as opposed to an anthropocentric perspective. An alliance between human and non-human, an echo from the galaxy—spending time with works by Ribeiro is like reading a book by Octavia E. Butler.”
How does it feel to be selected as an ArtConnect Artist to Watch?
It is an honor to be in the company of such great artists and to have the opportunity to share my work with a wider audience.
See more of Gabriel’s work
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