Life at close Quarters

2008
40 oil paintings on canvas 40 cm by 40 cm,
and an additional painting 120 cm by 120 cm

To live in one’s own space in different ways, to live everyday life examining and occupying different areas of the home, spaces which are not only physical but also mental. Just as an animal in a new environment would explore it through its senses and thus make it its own territory, living in it.

The camera is the starting point. I shot myself thanks to the auto-shooting function, this was the basic concept in order to reach objective results excluding subjectivity from the person watching as if the home-space was acting by itself.

Here are fragments of the pictures, disjointed body parts, broken symmetries, intrusions into space both unthinkable and real. So I decided not to show the somatic expressions on my face in order to keep away expressiveness. Only the body acts, moves, stretches and contains in order to explore the performance implications of “living in proximity” and to participate in the neverending story of painting.

Giuseppe Fabris

In Giuseppe Fabris’ latest works, particular attention is paid to an introspective search centered on the author’s physical and psychological identity as it interacts with its environment and on the ever-changing relations that are woven within this environment. Subjectivity, in its diverse forms and expressions, is a means to get closer to the knowledge of the private self which is nonetheless open to exchanging and sharing with others. However, subjectivity is also a means of apprehending and redefining the ‘limits’ of a ‘journey around one’s bedroom’.

That is the theme of this new set of paintings in which the body is compelled to inhabit ‘close quarters’, which drives it to search for a mimesis at entering the known familiar environment of the artist’s studio.

The body, like a wild animal, attempts to take possession of its territory as if the closeness of daily surroundings was to be measured from both a mobile and inquisitive point of view. The eye only perceives indirectly through the autofocus device a small part of the environment, a minute section of that familiar space which we don’t even see any longer, we are so used to it.

The physical contortions the body is put through are a starting point from which one can rediscover a territory, an environment which through drawing and painting becomes an extension of the body which inhabits it.

Roberto Daolio
October 2008
Directorate of Cultural Affairs and Tourism of Alassio, Italy