“(…) He leads us into the future, in this increasingly virtual future, immortalising in the ever- mouldable iron, the beauty of a world of values, the earth, his idea of man, culture and art. In one definition, Gibo eternalises with fire the civilization generated from fire itself. So that future made of bits, bytes and web will surely see us all stronger men”. [read more]
Luigi Borgo – Publisher and Art Critic
“(…) Faced with our ignorance, Gibo invites us to awaken and recognize, Socratically, that we do not know.
Then after a first moment of amazement at having confused an iron book for a “cinquecentina” (precious book printed in the XVI century) and a second moment in which Gibo / Socrates reveals us before the false knowledge of our times, there is a third, definitive and edifying: the iron book becomes in the hands an ingot, gold, for the completion of jewels in the form of thoughts. From that material, from the art that calls art, it is up to us to form words that will become thoughts. If this happens, they will be words and thoughts of salvation. And evangelization will still be”. [read more]
Luigi Borgo – Publisher and Art Critic
“(…) Thus a whole rural world was violently wiped out. The farms were pulled down and the crops were uprooted to erect blocks of flats and warehouses; old furniture and old straw chairs were burnt to make room, first, for those in formica and plastic ones, then, for the new straw-like chairs produced in China. “It was our long Crystal Night”, Gibo says, “where books the freedom of thought were thrown into the fire, along with the chairs (called “careghe” in Venetian dialect) and our origins”. There was a difference, though: the books were burnt by the Nazis, historically the absolute evil of Humanity, whereas the chairs were burnt by the same blood as those who had built them and usually made sure they were repaired…”. [read more]
Luigi Borgo – Publisher and Art Critic
“(…) With the Crevices, large iron plates ridged each with its own telluric trend, we enter the deepest core of the now forty-year long artistic research of Gibo Perlotto, in what is considered the most revealing moment of his art. Almost as if the Crevices were, despite the initial difficulty of interpretation that Gibo’s other hyperrealist art-works lack, the most effective key to understand his artistic thought, his “poetics”, the motive of all his work. In this sense, the Crevices are not the point of arrival of the Gibian art, but the central and revealing moment of his long artistic militancy…”. [read more]
Luigi Borgo – Publisher and Art Critic
“(…) We have the impression that when Gibo shows us the maize plant with roots, or the vine with lightning bolts and hanging iron wires, he is thinking of an autumn or even a winter vegetable garden, on which some unpicked fruit is left. Unlike when he makes vegetable crates, the image is that of the withdrawal, of lethargy, of closing oneself up waiting for new sap.
It is the winter landscape, where the part stands for the whole in this synecdoche that shows a plant and makes us imagine the field, the low clouds, the overcast sky, and the pungent cold that dampens the colours: the worst moment of the vegetable garden, conceptually more important, because the resurrection is being prepared.
The one that De Chirico did not call “still life” but “silent life”” [read more]
Marco Meneguzzo – Art Critic
“(…) It is not possible to look at the artworks of Angelo Gilberto Perlotto, Gibo, without being pervaded by the uncontrollable desire to touch them. It is absurd, almost blasphemous, to touch the material to satisfy the curiosity that is spreading, yet it is equally impossible to refrain from contact because the careful research of the artist aims to arrange that the result of his work is the sum of infinite elements, worthily representing, to reproduce, with iron, a reality that is at the limits of the surreal…”. [read more]
Paola Cassinelli – Art Critic
“(…) After the affirmation of the informal lexicon and the exponential spread of conceptual art, the artist from Vicenza enhances the use of techniques and materials more traditionally identified with artistic craftsmanship in the realization not only of objects but of complex compositions and installations”. [read more]
Giuliano Menato – Art Critic
“(…) The spiritual “savoir fare” links the activity of the ancient faber to that of a contemporary artist like Gilberto Perlotto, in which the technical skill learned in a family workshop apprenticeship and the poetics of an experience based on his own personal history are in harmony….” [read more]
Giovanna Grossato – Journalist and Art Critic
“(…) Maybe the artist tried to express beauty through musical crystallized stresses. And this beauty has a purity that hides the artist’s torment that, finished his art of love, doesn’t exist anymore”. [read more]
Giorgio Rigotto – Poet and Writer
“(…) Only the spirit of a poet could think: let’s stop them in time and in memory with the iron cast in the white and wrought on the anvil; let’s transmit their memory on forever for what they have been in the life of many people and for what they have been able to suggest to us. [read more]
Mario Rigoni Stern – Writer
“(…) We have already said that the key to hope surfaces despite everything, as the golden strips testify, through which dense words emerge to hold on to, precious messages to feed on. [read more]
Dario Vivian – Theologist and Essayist
“(…) Matter and memory between books and culture – Maybe never as in this case title and concepts converge and chase each other in the attempt to understand the work of Gilberto Perlotto. Or rather, his vision of thought. [read more]
Antonio Carradore – Art Critic
“(…) Angelo Gilberto Perlotto makes iron sing the stories of our sluggish souls. And awakens the sigh of our lost emotion. [read more]
Bepi De Marzi – Composer
“(…) His creations in the absolute domination of the ferrous material, of which he is a skilled smith and chaser, embody a sublime spiritual intensity, and express innocence and semplicity of the most spontaneous human feelings, of joy, of hope, in the name of universal love and pure and untouched beauty. [read more]
Elena Gollini – Art critic