Giulio Gamba

Giulio Gamba is a visual artist whose work moves between site-specific installation, visual poetry, and image-making: a practice he defines as Spaziopoetico. His approach begins with painting and explores the relationship between material, context, and perception. Through a focus on surface, texture, and symbolic layering, his work creates immersive experiences that invite reflection on the human condition and sensory interconnectedness.

In conversation with Giulio Gamba during the exhibition Oltre la pietra at Castelgrande, Bellinzona

What’s the purpose in your work?

When I think about my work, the first thing that comes to mind is my strong connection with painting. For me, that’s mainly what drives me to keep creating, trying to find a way to integrate painting into contemporary art. I often find myself drawn to the theme of the game. A work can’t really be born from a game if it’s taken too seriously, because that would limit it to being self-contained and finite. The game allows the introduction of unexpected, subconscious dynamics within a collective. So the work doesn’t remain just the artist’s, but can generate a sense of community. The game I refer to is something archaic and universal, with rules that are actually flexible depending on the players. This, to me, is very similar to artistic production and even the consumption of art. There are basic rules, but they’re adaptable based on context and the people engaging with art. So the game is a metaphor, something that fundamentally introduces you to the art world. It’s something you shouldn’t lose even as you become more involved. If your rules become too fixed and serious, that limits continuity, and art can become exhausting. That’s the problem with art: it tends to get tiresome when it becomes institutionalized, commercial, or mass-consumed. The game helps change the rules, finding fun even within seriousness, and vice versa.
Materials are like the foundation on which you can interact personally with your needs and desires as an artist. The materials are like the initial game rules. It’s essential that materials have their own intrinsic identity, as if they communicate a story linked to a culture, both to the artist and the audience. For example, as a painter, I obviously work with paint, but I don’t want to be limited to standard canvases. Staying confined to traditional impressions, nostalgia, and memories often keeps us stuck in 20th-century modern contexts. For me, the choice of canvas serves a function, the type of painting another function, and ideally, there’s a balance between these elements.

Tell us about the project you exhibited at Oltre la pietra

For this project, I chose cotton fabric, closely tied to painting history, but with a specific quality: it’s transparent, the kind of cotton used to make bedsheets. This transparency inspired me because it connects to my concept of transparent humanity, a humanity slowly giving way to something else, a moment of transition even if it’s not obvious. I also played with airbrushed painting, nebulous and light, allowing viewers to see what’s behind the painting. I brought two such canvases, left free from their usual rigid structure or frame. They can be shaped by the public or external factors like wind, rain, and sunlight, which change how the surface appears. They’re like layers that dictate what I can do as an artist. So I have to be very aware of the materials I use. Another detail: I hung bells on the paintings because I felt they have their own life, like the materials. Nothing expresses life more than sound. Movement is part of vitality, but sound draws us to that vitality. It’s like flies attracted to light, but here, we’re drawn by sound. Sound often evokes memories before we even see the painting, and those memories are subjective and different for everyone. At the same time, it leads us to see the same work, which remains open to interpretation. Before even seeing it, we let our imagination and memories take over. This is a crucial part of the work, allowing people to express their own ideas linked to childhood memories, the first time they heard a sound like that. Vision is clearly the first sense we use, but all senses are connected (...). It’s interesting because some senses are taken for granted, but they connect us to reality more deeply than sight, especially nowadays when what we see often seems real but we know it’s artificial.
I immediately felt that the venue where we’re exhibiting has a strong connection to the territory and history. I worked on these paintings, which reflect the history of the theater, during a period when I lived in Rome and worked next to a costume studio, specifically for opera and theater. I felt that these works connected well to the combination of Italian culture and Swiss folklore, especially the carnival, which is very present in Bellinzona. That inspired me to bring these kinds of costumes and characters in an almost anti-clerical way. Switzerland, and this place especially, is strongly linked to Christian culture, but there’s also folklore and mythology. There’s this sense of pressure that, at a certain time of year, is released through carnival. It’s an interesting moment where people take on a mask to perhaps reveal their true identity, without having to conform to fixed roles. I find this fascinating because art, in this sense, should free people instead of forcing a concept or idea. It should catalyze personal expression without fear. So that’s the link to carnival.

What’s the role of an artist?

The artist today is no longer what we traditionally imagine. We tend to live in the memory of what we grew up with, the image presented to us through education and familiarity. But today, the artist can be anything. Any kind of work can represent an artistic breakthrough. The key is that the approach is free, not predetermined by the need to sell or consume the work. The artist can explore many technical boundaries, but always with an openness to, I don’t know how to define it exactly, but I’d say openness to play. Because play introduces the unforeseen. Without a fixed end, this unforeseen element supports a work that longs for collectivity, that doesn’t just exist for itself, or as decoration or a commercial product.