Museum of Unnatural History

It was in 1991 that Ghibaudo began to give shape to his Museum of Unnatural History, structuring it with the Enlightenment rigour – if that term were not ironically oxymoronic – of a true eighteenth-century-style natural history museum. The project is divided into virtual and real halls, ideally housing and compartmentalising the various branches, twenty-five to date, ranging from Anthropology to Entomology, from Botany to Mutant Beings and Rare Specimens, from Ethnography to Anamorphosis, to name but a few. Within them appear hybrid and mutant beings, hybridised by physical and cultural metamorphic processes in the making, authenticated and, therefore, certified by the artist demiurge who christens them with names in Latin, as rigorous and icastic in describing their peculiarities as they are ironic and corrosive towards the assertiveness of scientific processes themselves: Hippotragus anteropostus spinatus, Antilocapra varicruris longicaudata, Avis canidi horroficati, Octopus caput avis, Capronis sexpedatus cum cauda pisciorum – just to mention a few and several of which are on show in the CEDAP space for the Organica contemporary art museum – often united by a common fish tail, a tribute and, at the same time, a mockery of the scientific theories that would have the origin of life on earth in a marine environment.

But if such a classificatory system makes the marvellous credible, it is the artist’s sculptural practice that visually substantiates it. Ghibaudo is a sculptor in the classical sense of the term, and his biomorphic paradoxes are realised thanks to an in-depth knowledge of the great technical-formal tradition of sculpture of the past, from Hellenistic sculpture to Roman portraiture, from the grotesque visionary nature of Romanesque-Gothic plastic art to 15th-century Tuscan relief, from Mannerist and Baroque virtuosity to the glossy finishes of neoclassical statuary. Over the years, he has experimented with all the expressive possibilities of different materials: marble, bronze, porcelain, ceramics, stone, cement, resins and recycled plastics.

This maniacal attention to form, bordering on virtuosity, is never an end in itself, it is part of an alchemic process of transformations and mutations necessary to make Dario Ghibaudo’s visual world ‘credible’ and, therefore, depressing and alienating, alien and familiar. For Achille Bonito Oliva (2022), this metamorphic process “is possible because the power of language reigns in the work, transforming any semblance into its own image and likeness. It puts itself at the service of this mutation, working tirelessly, firmly following the rule of withdrawal and disorientation, displacement and condensation, to build traps for the gaze’.

The artist’s visual traps therefore act on several levels and are triggered at the moment when the gaze remains trapped by the image, seduced by its ‘naturalness’ which, in its individual parts, manifests itself in human feet and legs that are both male and female, transcending genders and identities, animal protomes variously modified and yet, they too, familiar, tails, horns and excrescences that refer to a reassuring deja vu, but which, recomposed and variously recombined, bring us to a point of no return and, “after the initial courtship, the spectator’s attention is now a prisoner of the image, surrendered to the power of a familiarity that has managed to transform itself into extraneousness, to endure a metamorphosis a veritable ritual of fascination reminiscent of that, fatal, of the Homeric sirens or the spells of Circe, an ante litteram genetic engineering fairy.

It is not surprising that the Ghibaudo Museum of Unnatural History has been associated with another great container of dreams, nightmares and deformed beauties, Damien Hirst’s Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable. The immense wunderkammer set up by the British artist – amidst literary triggers or presumed literary triggers, past myths and contemporary legends, art history and pop culture, ostentatious splendour and trashy encroachments – is, at the same time, a continuous cross-reference between reality and fiction, ambivalence between the real and the verisimilar, a fable that tells of the infinite potential of making art and the far more concrete reality of the frenzy of the art market and art as shopping, in which, moreover, he himself is a leading actor.

Of an entirely different nature is Dario Ghibaudo’s approach. For the Piedmontese artist, his museum – decidedly antecedent and of a much longer chronological duration than Hirst’s treasures – renouncing the latter’s ostentatious citationism, his chromatic and value-based redundancy of the materials used in favour of that Canova-like whiteness that homogenises everything and makes it abstract and conceptual, stands as a lucid and merciless critique of contemporary development models. Models that can only be overcome with the antibodies of irony and emotional detachment, in the hypothesis of a fluid future world, open to the manipulations of the deoxyribonucleic acid of the imagination and dominated by cross-breeding (not only cultural), contamination, hybridisation and the thaumaturgic virtues of those fascinating deformis formositas, ac formosa deformitas so dear to St. Bernard.