Dario Ghibaudo was born in Cuneo, lives and works in Milan. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions since 1990. He exhibited in Italy in Venice at the Open 2005, international exhibition of sculpture, and in Milan at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Abroad, in Brussels, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Shanghai, Yerevan, Buenos Aires. In Cuneo, he is the author of the celebratory monument to Giuseppe Peano entitled Curva di Peano, created in 1998. His works include the Archive of the artist’s noses (by Andrea Serrano, Orleans, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Enrico Baj and others). The nose is placed on paper, placed in a cardboard box that collects it as a packaging box. For the artist, a nose recalls an entire face, imagining an entire portrait where the somatic features are mentally reconstructed around a single detail. The virtual archive, created in 1994, now has 70 examples of work. The noses, a selection of 15, were exhibited for the first and only time in Germany in ’98. Also worth mentioning is the project based on the enlightenment system of cataloguing and scientific recording, the vast cycle in continuous growth since 1990, the Museum of Unnatural History, full of creatures and fantastic characters, all works made strictly of synthetic materials.
Dario Ghibaudo was born in Cuneo, lives and works in Milan. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions since 1990. He exhibited in Italy in Venice at the Open 2005, international exhibition of sculpture, and in Milan at the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation. Abroad, in Brussels, Wiesbaden, Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Shanghai, Yerevan, Buenos Aires. In Cuneo, he is the author of the celebratory monument to Giuseppe Peano entitled Curva di Peano, created in 1998. His works include the Archive of the artist’s noses (by Andrea Serrano, Orleans, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Enrico Baj and others). The nose is placed on paper, placed in a cardboard box that collects it as a packaging box. For the artist, a nose recalls an entire face, imagining an entire portrait where the somatic features are mentally reconstructed around a single detail. The virtual archive, created in 1994, now has 70 examples of work. The noses, a selection of 15, were exhibited for the first and only time in Germany in ’98. Also worth mentioning is the project based on the enlightenment system of cataloguing and scientific recording, the vast cycle in continuous growth since 1990, the Museum of Unnatural History, full of creatures and fantastic characters, all works made strictly of synthetic materials.
“It is unnatural everything that is educated by man”
Jean Jaques Rousseau
Masked as a playful scientific catalog the works by Dario Ghibaudo out of his series “Museum Of Unnatural History”, ongoing since 1990, truly face the theme of the human condition. Animals and plants out of the ordinary, that at first sight seem recognizable, are gradually discovered from the viewer as the most exotic and improbable fruits of a wild imagination, or a genetically modified experiment, turned wrong. The anomalous is perceived more than seen, also in this case, exactly as it happens in the real natural world, as much as in human society and even in psychology. The borders of “normality” are fluid and change so radically following so many factors such as culture, religion, geography, politics, family dynamics, and education, that except for some extreme cases, are very hard to set.
The collection of Ghibaudo’s weird creatures remind us of our inner weirdness, exoticism, and uniqueness as to underline that all the peculiar characteristics that make each one of us as a unique being, are our strength. At the same time, those characteristics could be the triggering excuses for all those social tensions and discriminations fruit of the human difficulty of accepting what is different and external of our own personal micro-cosmos, on a personal level as much as on the communal one. A fact underlined by the many references to the captivity of exotic animals, plants, and “curiosities” – people included – collected by explorers and scientists over the centuries.
Ghibaudo gives life to his astonishing, fantastic creatures, going further than Salvador Dali, who created monstrous sculptures in bronze, just by stretching their proportions. Dario gave his animals life, skin, breath, thoughts, and emotions. We believe the artist that they are one hundred percent real, thanks to the choice of the material he uses. Limoges’ porcelain is one of the most fragile materials used for sculptures. By choosing it, the artist tells us that the world and the existence of these creatures are fragile, they are an endangered species, needing protection and respect, as a symbolic invitation to protect and nourish ourselves and all the peculiarities making us unique.
