Ivano Fabbri at the Belgioioso castle: 80 works by the Bolognese artist on display

The Castle of Belgioioso, the famous Visconti residence in the province of Pavia built in the 14th century, hosts until March 24th Ivano Fabbri and his intercessors, anthological exhibition curated by Leonardo Conti, which in over eighty works recounts the last fifteen years of the Bolognese artist’s research.

The adventure of Ivano Fabbri’s steel forms followed feverish, almost hasty paths. And it is almost paradoxical to talk about an anthological journey in such a short time. Yet, the internal transformations of this research are such as to induce a very long perspective, albeit illusory. And the illusory is an integral part of this poetics. Evidently, the artist’s constant dedication to the work of the artist, busy between planning and creating his steel works, is necessary – but not sufficient (it never is) -. The variety and complexity of such a path can perhaps be justified by putting time aside, such as to allow Fabbri to create a profound harmony, a real process of contemporaneity with those researches that he immediately felt similar to, such as object art from Fontana’s Spatialism onwards, up to kinetic and programmed experiences: from Bonalumi, Dadamaino, Scheggi, Ormenese, up to Le Parc, Garcia Rossi, Biasi, Colombo and Boriani, to name just a few.

His extraordinary ability to insert himself in an unprecedented and original way into the problematic knots that make those poetics open to the future was the creative strategy that made this feverish research possible. In other words, it is possible to think of this timelessness of Fabbri’s research as an unlimited extension of the profound reasons that produce certain ways of conceiving art. Living completely immersed in these ways has created the conditions for a heterogeneous convergence, a true syncretism, in which an unprecedented and highly original style has emerged. Ivano Fabbri embodies one of the most relevant aspects of the contemporary (and in a certain sense of art tout court), in which time dramatically slows down its horizontal dimension (diachrony), to verticalize itself in a broad and very deep synchronic layer in which the meaning (the work) tries to emerge from a congeries that tends towards chaos and the undifferentiated.

The intercessors are precisely those artists whose problematic issues Fabbri has not ceased to explore, through technical means that the past did not know. In fact, the profile that emerges immediately is that of an artist fully aware of the new means that technology makes available to art, in particular lasers for steel processing. Lucio Fontana, founder of the intercessors, expected that a similar search would come from the future: Fabbri is part of a prophecy. In the third manifesto of spatialism it reads: “The Spatial Movement aims to achieve an art form with new means that technology makes available to artists”. When the master announced to his associates an art capable of nourishing itself on the products of technology to make itself a new art, he would certainly have nodded thinking of the laser as an artistic technique.

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Now, the experience gained by Fabbri in modeling with Autocad and in the use of the latest generation machine tools, including laser ones, allows him to experiment with extraordinary and unprecedented ways of treating steel, in the creation of works made of space and light. Here then the planes multiply, opening up in cuts, twists, lights, producing an internal spatiality in which color emerges as a sudden and unlimited background. Here the works fragment, arranging themselves on the wall like multiple organisms that seem like constellations. Here those organisms enter the space as real sculptural constructions, in an idea of ​​integral, even habitable space. The exhibition is completed by a catalog edited by Leonardo Conti, with the scientific consultancy of Sara Bastianini, in an editorial collaboration between PoliArt and Eclipse Arte Edizioni of Milan.