The exhibition Gibberish, presents a new suite of works by Tommaso Nervegna-Reed, that applies the logic of the gibberish, as a formal method to abstract what was once representational.

Untitled (DVD painting), 2025, is a monumental large-scale painting, empty dvd cases are individually painted, pressed and stapled onto the canvas. The DVDs are devoid of content, stripped of their audio-visual material and are instead utilised as a tool. They are assorted in a rough, jagged manner that shifts up and down vertically. This sense of movement, forms a birdseye view of a sprawling city that sits beneath a layer of grey fog. Thin white lines wrestle in this grid-like space, forming silhouettes that outline the raised dvd forms. Beneath this surface, the pressure of the plastic dust jackets suffocates the paint. Causing a rippling underneath that appears as a liquid current that runs through the entire canvas.

The image-object paintings that line the gallery wall depicts a range of images of ancient Roman and European crosses, placed on metal scales. The images shift in and out of focus, due to being layered onto can carrier holders. These can holders provide a topological landscape through which the ancient artefacts can be excavated. The bumpy and uneven surface creates pockets of concentrated colours, blurring into cloud-like forms. The granulation of the CYMK print creates an impressionistic texture to the work, where the crosses only come into focus at a distance. Their various physical weights are illuminated in blue, reminiscent of a bedside clock or bible verse numbers. Nervegna-Reed fragments and layers the historic cross, onto a contemporary landscape of beer holders, that become relics in their absence, like the empty DVD cases.

Disney Vlog (compressed), 2025, is a video-piece that collages online vlogs from various Disneyland locations; California, Paris, Tokyo. In an attempt to establish a shared ground with the vlogger, the artist selected sites that they had also visited. The perspective/ image of the vlogger has been deliberately cut out, instead, we see mundane moments of eating food, shopping, walking amongst the constructed landscapes and scanning into rides. Overlaid onto this, is the soundtrack from the Italian neorealist film Bicycle Thieves, 1948, directed by Vittorio De Sica. As Antonio Ricci, played by Lamberto Maggiorani, a non-professional actor, wanders the streets of post-war Rome in search of his lost bicycle, the vloggers wait in line to Space Mountain and purchase cinnamon sugar coated Mickey Mouse pastries. An operatic tempo filters through these mundanities. Nervegna-Reed likens the slow-to-fast paced hand gestures of a conductor leading an orchestra, to the highs and lows experienced through a roller-coaster.

Disney Vlog (compressed), 2025, deliberately offers an expanded and distorted paradigm of what constitutes an experience. We encounter a spliced together narrative that shifts into the night, through an increasing gibberish-like language and world.

– Nica Nervegna-Reed