Gabriele Ciulli, Henry Galano, ZZZ at Five Years Gallery, London

ZZZ by Gabriele Ciulli and Henry Galano, curated by Rochelle Fry, at Five Years Gallery, London, 05/04/2025–15/04/2025.

Exhibition text:
Friedrich Engels ventured forth in 1844 to detail the living and working conditions of the English working class, he started by standing on a ship venturing up the Thames: I know of nothing more imposing than the view one obtains of the river when sailing from the sea up to London Bridge. Especially above Woolwich the houses and docks are packed tightly together on both banks of the river. The further one goes up the river the thicker becomes the concentration of ships lying at anchor, so that eventually only a narrow shipping lane is left free in mid-stream. Here hundreds of steamships dart rapidly to and fro. All this is so magnificent and impressive that one is lost in admiration. The traveler has good reason to marvel at England’s greatness even before he steps on English soil. It is only later that the traveler appreciates the human suffering that has made all this possible. Atomized humans all bobbing together. Perspective not of the stars of sailors or the ever lasting horizons but of the forced and leveraged perspectives of the port and the city as the true tricks of the trade. Cobbled together visions of a long past imperium post, channel the long march of an impressive diversion. Through the narrow and dark alleyways of the streets, in its contrasting frescos and grand edifices, the logic of the internal garden of paradise prevails against the workers beast of unsightly forms of civic fright.

As a Boschian trigger, the altar of the enclosed roads comes as a ghost of our modern selves, oh this de- evolution. As in all island dwarfism, giantism, animals grow too big or small without predators, or too many. Long live this long Industrial Revolution. The past too was an island in the fetish of decay. The long iron piers of Southend, and Southport, and the long walk across the channel. Our perspectives in the marshes of this strange English light, its northern tears forged of sails and canvas. A sculptors paradise, an architects tomb in the grottos of the garden. Its murmuring facades don’t let one in, only around the edges with its river Hull outlets as double edged faucets. We’re all tired now, doesn’t it seem like a lot all those structures. Subtle shifts of the mirage, this miraculous panorama, as an angel of the Thames shines upon a new perspective. Seen it you did not, capitalism shines brightest in the sewers of London.

These sculptures carve out the essential forms of the day, a craven and harrowing medieval past we hurtle towards rapidly. The Iron Age, Bronze Age, Copper age, and our infinite and mirrored world of glass, renewed hoy! The city becomes a sculpture park of history like that of a cemetery without walls. Buried forever in a tired sculptural synchronicity, rising up and through the dug deep ground. Filtering through the carved and sediments of the built forms, layer upon layer, what do you see but time sung deep. This long and old revolution of sights unseen as icebergs in our eyes. High heads roll hard, upon the great guillotine of the shard, the bustling ships of today, are the glass world of perspective. Instead of the endless horizon of the maritime anchored in Greenwich.

Claustrophobic rooming houses of north, east, south, and west. The endless scroll of glass time, reveals and cuts through small strange channels. Here, you are, standing in the new and improved. Don’t you see, believe it here at its first stop. Tired of the relentless 24/7, we sleep in unison, as hammocks in a sailors cabin, swinging with the times, alas, Troubadour’s of the decks unite in their sway.