Cleto Gibello (callabiana, 1892 – Turin, 1944), Pair Of Still Lifes With Fruit And A Pitcher

Cleto Gibello (Callabiana, 1892 – Turin, 1944)

Pair of still lifes with fruit and a pitcher

(2) Oil on canvas, 70 x 79 cm – With frame, 85 x 93 cm

Signed and dated lower right: “CGibello 1914”

Cleto Gibello, born in Callabiana in 1892 and active primarily in Turin until his death in 1944, is an emblematic figure in Piedmontese art collecting and painting of the first half of the 20th century. He completed his artistic training at the Accademia Albertina in Turin, where he absorbed the rigorous principles of the great subalpine figurative school under the guidance of masters such as Giacomo Grosso and Cesare Ferro. From Grosso, he inherited a bold sense of brushwork and a solid command of chiaroscuro, while from Ferro’s teaching he gained a keen attention to formal elegance, decorativism, and a delicate rendering. After temporarily interrupting his artistic career to fulfill his military service during World War I, Gibello became a full-fledged participant in the Piedmontese and national art exhibition scene, drawing the attention of critics for his skill as a portraitist and for the mastery with which he approached landscape painting and genre scenes.  Cleto Gibello’s stylistic signature falls within the tradition of continuity and renewal in Verist and Post-Impressionist painting that characterized much of Turin’s artistic output between the two world wars. His painting style is marked by a profound confidence in the underlying drawing—never rigid—over which the artist applies color with textured, broad, and vibrant brushstrokes. Gibello favors a rich and luminous color palette, capable of bringing the pictorial surfaces to life through contrasts of light and shadow modulated with great naturalness. The two still lifes under consideration, created in 1914, offer a precious and evocative testament to the young Piedmontese artist’s early work, revealing a refined and almost hyperrealistic interpretation of his figurative language, closely linked to the great Flemish tradition and 17th-century naturalism reinterpreted with early 20th-century sensibilities. Clearly conceived as a pair, the compositions share a rigorous structural, chromatic, and conceptual coherence: on a wooden surface rendered with analytical precision, the artist arranges various fruits of the earth alongside an archaic-looking terracotta jug, which also serves as a constant and unifying element in both scenes. In the first painting, the visual focal point is dominated by a split watermelon that lays bare its bright red flesh, while in the second, the counterpoint is provided by an open pumpkin, with its bumpy rind and golden-orange interior, around which are arranged peaches, split figs, and greenish and black grapes. In both paintings, the lifelike rendering of the materials—the sheen of the skins, the velvety flesh of the peaches, the transparency of the grape berries, and the earthy texture of the terracotta—reveals meticulous study from life and impeccable technical skill. From a stylistic and conceptual perspective, these 1914 works reveal how Gibello, despite having been trained in the tradition of Turin’s academic and realist painting, approached the genres of vanitas and classical trompe-l’œil with extreme clarity.