Everything can happen. Everything is possible and probable.
Time and space do not exist. Only a flimsy framework of reality,
the Imagination spins, weaving new patterns.
August Strindberg
(author’s note: closing quote from "Fanny and Alexander"
by Ingmar Bergman, one of my favourite films)
Simone Tribuiani’s work fits into this vision suspended between reality and imagination. Tribuiani seems to retain only the imprint of time, the fleeting trace of a gesture. His works bring to light the sporting moment not so much as a celebration of a victory, but as the memory of an emotion already vanished.
His subjects—athletes, spectators, aerial shots in which the athletes completely vanish—live in a dilated and melancholic time, like frames found in a dream. Tribuiani does not portray sport as a competition, but as a human condition: downtime and days composed of the repetition of seemingly insignificant moments and details, depicted through the childlike gaze of a child watching his mother prepare breakfast.
Sport enjoyed as a spectator has the ability to function as a bookmark of time: around the frames portrayed by Tribuiani is the life of those who had observed them, the works almost become a completion of all that was happening in the life of the spectator at
that moment: lost beloved ones, the tactile feelings of sofas, tables, carpets, desaturated colors, and a warmth whose sweetness was not remembered any longer.
A sort of poetics of the ephemeral, a search for beauty in the moment it dissolves. His painting thus becomes an act of resistance against oblivion, a way to weave—on that fragile loom evoked by Strindberg—a new memory, where time does not flow but folds in on itself, holding for a moment what is bound to disappear.
-Tommaso Buldini
A Note on "Let it Snow"
From the arrival of Simone Tribuiani and Tommaso Buldini in Trento sparked an immediate desire of collaboration between the artist and the galleries Studio d’Arte Raffaelli and Cellar Contemporary. After that initial meeting, which resulted in a series of works presented at art fairs in Bologna, Verona, Padua, Rome, and even Cape Town, publishing projects were born —such as the "Gazzetta del Tribu"—and exhibitions—such as the online exhibition "Legends on Wood"—.
At the end of 2025, on the occasion of the Milan - Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, Simone Tribuiani with Cellar Contemporary will present a new series of works dedicated to winter sports, characterized by snow-covered landscapes and by the peculiar sense of time that, as evoked in Buldini’s text, has always characterized his work.
