Marco Emmanuele’s solo exhibition at LABS Gallery, Bologna Italy
At first glance, Palmo panorama sounds almost paradoxical. The intimacy of a palm set against the vastness of a panorama suggests a tension at the heart of Marco Emmanuele’s solo exhibition at LABS Gallery. It stages a dialogue between scale and perception, between what is held in the hand and what stretches beyond the horizon, and between the confines of the studio and the boundless imagination of landscape.
This duality finds its most powerful expression in ISO #250, a monumental work whose near architectural scale immediately commands the space. Yet its true force lies not in size but in material intimacy. Composed of innumerable grains of sand and fragments of crushed glass, the surface reveals an accumulation of microscopic gestures rather than sweeping brushstrokes. Emmanuele’s process, closer to mosaic than painting, relies on a spatula instead of a brush, spreading sand and glass across the canvas like a mason guided by poetry rather than construction. The result is an abstract landscape that feels primordial and alive, where elements resembling earth, air, and water collide in continuous motion.
ISO #250 offers no fixed point of view, yet it invites a vertical gaze, as if the viewer were observing a territory from above. Despite this imagined distance, the work remains deeply tactile. Its rough, glistening surface functions like a skin, enveloping the viewer and transforming the gallery wall into a window opening onto an unstable Pangea suspended between creation and erosion.
This panoramic vision is counterbalanced by sculptural works scattered across the gallery floor. Cast in aluminum, these forms resemble clods of earth marked by furrows impressed into sand by the trace of a hand. Gesture here becomes landscape. The human body enters the panorama, shaping it through action. The grooves were carved using laser cut iron plates shaped after the profiles of five poets: Dario Bellezza, Giorgio Caproni, Jolanda Insana, Lucio Piccolo, and Valentino Zeichen, linking the works to a lineage of visceral language.
Subtle details punctuate the exhibition: glass marbles lifting the sculptures slightly from the ground, creating delicate suspension, and a small drawing of two hands barely touching, hidden like a secret. Together, these elements underscore the importance of gesture and making in Emmanuele’s practice, suggesting a small demiurge at play, a child on an autumn beach shaping worlds from sand, glass, and imagination. It resonates quietly, long after leaving the gallery space behind.
