Gabrielle Barzaghi
When Objects Dream

The drawings of When Objects Dream sharpen the political edge of Gabrielle Barzaghi’s body of work, without diminishing either the power of her drawings to evoke mythic transcendence or their presence as material drawings having delicate textures, vivid colors, and the gestures of the artist’s hand.

Barzaghi’s wide-ranging imagination has become more explicitly historical, and her new fictions barely contain their own political energy. Artifacts from the realms of play and art are freighted with human context and glow with the nearly magical aura of their material histories—these are the objects’ dreams. At the same time, narrative distance and nostalgic longing for the naïveté of objects, toys, and animals recontextualize and recolor perceptions of human actions, ambitions, comforts, and pain.

Fables have always been a serious form of art. Both intuitive and satirical, they contact both the timeless and the pragmatic and both the collective and the personal as they contrast the simple motivations attributed to others with the complex uncertainties of subjective experience. Barzaghi’s visual fables render the tensions of these dualities beautifully.