With its warm reddy-brown tones and a hint of light peeping out from behind a mound, Perigee immediately grabs your attention. But what are we looking at, and what was artist Gabriela Giroletti thinking about when she created the piece?
“I wanted to portray a space and a form and to have a very peculiar texture and colour,” she explains. “This work carries an ambiguous feel of a landscape and a bodyscape.”
“Are we looking out across a desert panorama, or are we up close and personal, next to a human body?”
There certainly is a glorious ambiguity to Perigee. Are we looking out across a desert panorama, or are we up close and personal, next to a human body? Maybe the title itself gives a clue: “perigee” being the point in the orbit of the moon (or a satellite) at which it is closest to the Earth. The longer you study Perigee, the more depth and detail is gently revealed.
And this is just what Giroletti wants: the Brazil-born artist thrives on the ambiguousness of her work, enjoying the exploration and tension created by others’ interpretations of her pieces. This concept of making “open-ended” art drives her wider practice. “All my work is connected by an invisible thread,” she tells us. “It is one big massive body of work. They are different yet the same. The intention is the same and the motivation is the same.”
“All my work is connected by an invisible thread. It is one big massive body of work. They are different yet the same.”
Gabriela graduated from the Slade School of Art and her expressionistic style straddles the figurative and the abstract. In November 2021, she opened her first solo show at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in Wandsworth, London. Inspired by her own everyday motility, Gabriela’s canvases combine hints of human motions and emotions with bold shapes and colours.
Perigee was produced during Giroletti’s month-long residency at Elephant’s Lab and builds on her desire to explore themes of landscape, the body, physicality, space, colour and movement. “Like all my work,” she says, “it is rooted in the process but the resulting image is very pictorial or very metaphysical. This work in particular is both.”
This signed pigment print is available exclusively from Elephant in a strictly limited edition of 50.
