Gabriel Cole
Letters from Perugina
June 7th – 29th, 2024
Love Letters from Perugina explores the relationship between the industrial component of spatial design and the quantitative spirit of human emotion. In his new body of work, Gabriel Cole seeks to distil passing moments of wisdom into physical objects. Through humour and poetic gesture, Cole suggests the existence of a kind of collective knowledge, imparted through an unofficial oral tradition (not without an edge of satire). The concepts contained within each work are delivered romantically, with a tone akin to that of a message found within a fortune cookie.The trade of sign-writing is inextricably linked to Cole’s practice. To Cole, script font represents the embodiment of a purposeful gesture’s power to imbue communication with a sense of virtue. Similarly in tattooing, script plays a mysterious role in granting a statement, a spiritual weight. It is thereby reserved, in many cases, to approach ineffable topics such as love,death and romance.
In this series Cole also considers the commercial application of his artistic practice, ceramics, specifically in the manifestation of the tile. Situating a mundane product within a hierarchy of information, Cole literally expands the object in order to adorn it and invites the viewer to contemplate the trodden artefact’s potential as a metaphorical viewing platform. By enticing the audience into reading into its engraved markings, the artist invites the comparison of a gravestone.Through a disruption of the graphic formulas of communication used in capitalism, Cole simultaneously nods to the contemporary context that his practice exists within, and the trade-based practices that inform it. It occupies a liminal space between personal and public experience.
Cole’s interest in architecture has had a clear presence in his practice since its conception. American artist Gordon Matta Clark’s disarrangement of architecture to create literal transparency in spaces has similarly had a lasting effect on Cole’s work, namely seen in the ambiguous plurality of contexts it suggests, where the distinction between the outside world and our internal lives becomes blurred. This being a key theme in the installation process of Cole’s new body of work Love Letters from Perugina.
