Gentile’s prolific artistic practice enables him to create with a wide range of possibilities. His activity can be divided between an inner practice – evident in canvases and small-scaled sculptures – and a more public scope. This versatility allows his character to come out and enables his sense of freedom as an artist to emerge.
The circumstance that the tropical island of Bali has become his most permanent residence for about 25 years resides in the double possibility it presents: this is one of the world’s most crossed-cultured places, extremely traditionalist in its singular Hindu rituals and constant colorful ceremonies, and simultaneously one of the world’s most cosmopolitan atmospheres, home to various western communities. This intellectual balance, conjoined with a major presence of craftsmanship, working in international standard quality, allowed him to stay and produce vast amount of, and large artworks.
The Artist, Gentile perceives his working method as connected to those of musicians: after learning the basic notes – drawing, geometry and the knowledge provided by Art History – one can compose a ‘symphony’ – paintings, sculptures and, more recently, the possibilities enabled by Computer Aided Design (CAD), which he has been exploring since the late 1990s. A believer in classical and canonized education, Gentile keeps a graphic diary in the form of sketchbooks that became the foundation of his image bank. More recently, Gentile has augmented the paper diaries with an iPad. In addition to this gadget, he keeps a photographic and written record of people and situations he interacts with.
The ‘organic’ ingredient of his artwork thus resides outside the working methodology, rather is borne from the manner he utilizes his personal archive, vast due to several anthropological and ethnographical explorations. This system is what Gentile offers to the viewer: on the one hand, he expresses a personal synthesis of art and life and on the other hand, he delivers a constant citation of legacy – that he applies with extreme ease – and provides new directions for its usage.
Therefore, Gentile’s artistic practice is many times explained as an assemblage of elements embedded with references and material citations of local specificities pertaining to the locations he arrives to.
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