Biography
Gentile grew up in the cultural atmosphere of the '70s in Florence, where he graduated in Architecture. He was also a musician and experimental performer. In the mid '80s, in Verona, he wrote songs and sang with his rock band, and worked as a scene, graphic and furniture designer. In 1997 his first exhibits of work executed with pastels with a look of unusual angles in its daily movement in space. His most recent works, Industrial Archaeologies, divert the attention onto cultural products for survival: they are geological finds of a recent civilisation, the industrial one. These works, rigorously pastel painted with extreme precision, are totems, neglected mechanical parts abandoned to indifference. These objects, captured in their monumental plasticity are tragically present; they seem solid and impregnable mechanisms like ancient war machines. The support material is presented as fragile, recycled cardboard, as meagre as the oppressive isolation of the objects. And yet in this ambivalent scene of force and fragility is the harmonious result of the mix where the support is not only the place of evocation but becomes expressive material that transforms itself into light and colour.
