I’ve got my shoes off, I’m bouncing up and down on a giant inflatable, and I’m looking at a dolphin, mid-leap. As I’m trying to contort myself into its shape, an invigilator walks into the gallery: ‘Would you like me to put some more air in it?’
In his exhibition at Dalston’s Limoncello gallery, young Rome-based artist Gabriele de Santis has created an enormous inflatable, almost filling the entire space, as a way of exploring ideas of motion and movement. Coloured plastic hula-hoops are mounted on framed works of resin on the walls. Adjacent to these are plastic and marble silhouettes of leaping dolphins, frozen in time as they jump towards the rings, seemingly urging themselves into the third dimension. Other framed works comprise marble harlequin patterns, which the artist tenuously invites the audience to consider as moving in time too, the marble having once been sand.
Molecular material analysis may seem slightly arbitrary but it’s all part of the absurdity of De Santis’s spectacle. Abandoned shoes are placed next to the cast of a skateboard, as if the owner has just been blown away. Dolphins have been named after characters from the American sitcom ‘Scrubs’. Despite the show’s nod to ideas of motion, don’t go expecting to be moved. Instead, go for a wealth of intercultural reference and good times as you bounce around.
Nick Warner