One of these extraordinary phenomena is bioluminescence, meaning the capacity of certain living creatures, such as fireflies or fish living in the depths of the ocean, to emit light radiations producing electricity. What in the history of mankind has been a hard-won achievement, nature has managed to reproduce without any artifice, feeding on the energy given by the spirit of adaptation to the environment, by the evolutionary capacity inherent in every organism… Therefore Gambino pays tribute to the vital force of nature and its constant capacity to renew itself, making its profile, or that of a majestic butterfly, emerge in the dark from a swarm of butterflies covered with delicate touches of fluorescent paint, like the shoal of fish moving on the wall, swaying as if cradled by the waves of the sea, creating an enchanted and magical atmosphere…
Poetry, illusion and metaphors accompany his amazing works…
A propitiatory symbol, since ancient times, of metamorphosis and rebirth, an emblem of the ephemeral and of everything eternal, the butterfly represents balance, transformation, successful projects, grace and ability to accept change; it recalls the process of alchemical transformation to which the spirit of each of us is subjected, even in spite of ourselves, during our lives. Above all, it is the representation of the freedom to which every man aspires. But can something as small as a butterfly have such great significance? In Gambino’s works this becomes possible by drawing inspiration from the theory of chaos of the American mathematician Edward Lorenz, according to which there is a logical pattern of connections linking events that are distant from each other in time and space, i.e. a sensitive dependence of the behavior of a system on small variations in the initial conditions, which can also cause long-term variations, the so-called “butterfly effect”. The fact that there can be an unexpected connection between two events occurring at a considerable distance in time had already been translated into scientific terms by the British mathematician Alan Turing with the metaphor that the molecular movement caused by the beating of a butterfly’s wings can provoke a chain of other movements of the same type that follow one another until they cause a hurricane. “Can the beating of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil cause a tornado in Texas?”…
In this concatenation of events, Michael Gambino sees how the course of all the facts occurring on the surface of our planet, from the most insignificant to the most important, is subjected to a system of cyclical recurrences, expressed by the course of the curves of Lorenz’s mathematical diagram that seem to outline the shape of a butterfly; it is thus that this wonderful creature becomes the building block for the construction of a model of behavior for all possible universes, linked by a deterministic chaos of which the “butterfly effect” is the generating principle. The artist’s original expressive technique stigmatizes the totality of the dynamics that govern the course of the natural, social, political and economic balances on our planet and the overall chain of events that occur in every corner of the universe. The thickening of the butterflies in the artist’s worlds comes to represent the intimate connection of all aspects of life in continuous change to induce us to grasp the deepest connection with the Whole. The result is a work that should be read and enjoyed in its many dimensions: the aesthetics of these small butterflies lead us to what they are meant to symbolize, namely the intimate and subterranean link between all aspects of life in order to indeed grasp the connection with the Whole.