Artistic approach

For the artist, the theme of the mind-body connection has existed since the dawn of time and is set to last forever. Faithful to that line, Davide Galbiati is seeking a plastic language based on simple yet singular forms which both evoke ancestral peoples and civilisations living in a sidereal future. He exalts the human aura to make the invisible visible. He draws his inspiration from the work of ancient sculptors such as Thoutmôsis-sculptor of the pharaoh Akhenaton, and archaic Greek sculptures. The artist nurtures the burning desire to confront the clamour of the world to the vibrant silence of stillness. He gets away from the dynamic contortions of the Baroque or neo-classical sculptures to embrace the telluric calmness of the ancient Pharaohs. Davide Galbiati leads us to sculpture through the path of silence.

Expositions SOLO

2022
“Semences” – Cathédrale Ste M. d’Assomption, Vaison-la-Romaine

2020
“Praesentia” – Cathédrale Ste M. d’Assomption, Vaison-la-Romaine

2019
Château de Simiane – Valréas

2018
“Alchemy” – Kellie Miller Arts Gallery – Brighton (UK)

2017
Galerie Jérome B. – Bordeaux

2016
Prince & Princess Gallery – Paris
Kellie Miller Art Gallery – Brighton (UK)

2014
“Traces de Lumière” – Cathédrale Ste M. d’Assomption, Vaison-la-Romaine
“Puissance et Fragilité” – Parvis d’Avignon – Chapelle des Italiens – Avignon

2012
Galerie Gaston De Luppé – Arles
Ferme des Arts – Vaison-la-Romaine
Chapelle des Pénitents Blancs – Gordes
Galerie des Origines- Vaison-la-Romaine

2011
” The roots of soul ” – Cairanne

2010
“Scolpire l’anima” – Salle Angelo Lodi, Buscate – Milan (IT)

2008
L’Eco del Sacro, Castellazzo dei Barzi – Milan (IT)

2007
” L’anima del Legno ” Musée Luigi Magugliani, Corbetta – Milan (IT)

Authors’ texts

Sculptor of souls

Davide Galbiati’s sculptural work feeds on the imaginary space of the tree. He searches its form for the figures that inhabit it: the column, the capital, the standing man. With his scissors, Galbiati confronts its round, vertical form. He sculpts the fragrance of the squared-off tree, still alive. He feeds on the memory of its roots, branches and fruits. (…)

But sculpting a man with his soul is not just a matter of skill. The path that leads beyond the great craft is singular; no master can cross this threshold with his pupil. Galbiati, like all those who choose this path, searches alone for the forms that make “presence” visible.

He is warned: form is born of contrary tensions that are not forced, but harmonized. In this way, the form defies gravity and gives the whole work an upward movement.

The founding face

Davide Galbiati focuses all his attention on faces. It is here that he resolves the geometric and architectural construction of the body. Under his chisel, it’s the head that carries the weight of the temple, of the whole body. His faces are conceived as capitals, keystones where the weight of the world and the weight of heaven are negotiated. A weight so heavy that the eyes close and the faces concentrate.

Here we see the inner life: prayer, fear, attention, contemplation, thought, abandonment, imagination.

The sculptor’s science and gift is that everything rises and nothing falls. Davide Galbiati, however, goes beyond cold calculations on a scale where the energies at play are equivalent. This rigor, always present, is well hidden beneath the profusion of vegetation, the movement of life, the presence of a soul.

Column statues

Cathedral construction sites have disappeared, but the columnar statue still emerges under Galbiati’s gouge. He loves sculpting irreducible sanctuaries: pillars with bare feet, serene faces, hands making the liturgical gesture of offering.

Both large and small works are highly structured: tensions and lines of force build up and find a resolution to their contradictions, their balance in the face. The face then seems to invade the whole space, overflowing its limits, spreading out like a radiance of thought, like the foliage of a tree. In the past, painters used to put a halo on saints to signify their glory and aura; Galbiati has integrated this into the very body of his sculpture.

The central theme ofGalbiati’s sculptural work is undoubtedly to bring out the invisible in man. This is the challenge of his creation.

The concrete-loving sculptor

Soul and form are linked. The artist in the studio knows this, experiencing at every moment this companionship between visible and invisible that we call life. It’s this subtle link that Galbiati loves to sculpt. When he fails to grasp it, he knows he has failed, and he starts again. Sometimes you have to wait…the work of form is mysterious: willpower and skill are not the whole story; grace has its unpredictable part to play.

Davide Galbiati is committed to his privilege as an artist, which is to bring the resonance of the soul in form to the visible world. A master woodcarver, he naturally found his inspiration in the strong analogy between tree and man. He has expressed this in many ways in his work. But the day comes when, to go further, you have to leave behind worlds you’ve mastered too well… You have to face up to the unknown and take on a few challenges. His curiosity led him to explore the most unfamiliar materials. Little by little, the paradoxical desire arose to bring together the most opposing of things: the most subtle forms that the soul gives to the body that shelters it – with the most inert, artificial and despised of materials.

Just as the alchemist seeks to transform lead into gold, he is thinking of metamorphosing grey concrete into noble stone. It’s a learned chemistry too! It’s all about mixing materials, proportions, regulating temperature, hydration and setting time. The aim is to create a new material that is more docile to the will of the hand, and ultimately harder and more resistant to time.

Achieving this a little better every day is a symbolic victory. Isn’t it civilizing, this material erected as towers that has replaced trees and forests? Rather than despair, why not ennoble it? Why not give it the form of a soul? Why not imbue it with images, why not adorn these concrete colossi with a decor that makes them accessible to man’s secret desires?

Aude de Kerros

A sculpture is an instant stolen from the void, just as stars are minutes conquered from infinity. Davide Galbiati’s immobile figures transport us into spaces where silent gravity reigns. Davide’s surgical hands patiently dissect concrete, stone and wood, uncovering trapped souls.

Henri Focillon speaks of hands as follows: “They are almost animate beings. Servants? Perhaps. But endowed with an energetic and free genius, with a physiognomy – faces without eyes or voice, but which see and speak. In time, some blind people acquire such a finesse of tact that they are able to discern, by touching them, the figures on a deck of cards, in the infinitesimal thickness of the image”.

Davide is a direct descendant of the Egyptian sculptors of Osiris, and his quest is identical. Carve into the fruit of the flesh to reach the pure core of the unspeakable. This ascetic outlook calls for the recollected action of the meditative gesture. But Davide’s monastic stance does not put his imagination to rest. The fabulous caps the purity of his esoteric figures. The fantastic flares up in the statics of his works.

It’s not enough to be a poet of the Sacred, the form has to match the thought. Davide Galbiati, a sculptor of mystical enchantment, uses skilful layouts to create areas where light and shadow interact. He offers us all his mysterious volumes with emotional forces that radiate from within and assert themselves in tension on the visible surface. Davide Galbiati is a magician.

Michel King Chairman, Societé Nationale des Beaux Arts