(Italiano) Retaggi

Two binomials: watching-seeing, hearing-hearing.

On a winter walk on the beach where the silence gives way to the breath of the sea, and Morandi’s colours envelop us like a blanket of dust, I looked around and heard the roar of the waves on the stone pebbles.

My nomadic gaze wandered from the ground to the sky and back again in a slow, meditative walk.

The pebbles and woods and their infinite shapes so organic and harmonious gave way to the perfect, linear, immaterial horizon, then my gaze rested again on the ground and on the sad and ever alien remains of plastic, alien in their shape and their artificial colours.

Among these elements another inhabited the space, the metallic and rusted remains of tools, mechanical pieces, of decorative objects now dilapidated, so I felt the need to take them in hand, touch them feel their weight observe their wrinkles, metal like stones are living elements.

Rust immediately brings me back to distant memories, to history. I continue my slow, meditative walk as my gaze, as if hypnotised, falls more and more on those metal remains, so I concentrate only on them, and every time I see one I go to meet it. In the distance I see one that has for its shape and perhaps not only the features of a man’s bust in profile, I approach it and take it in my hand, it is an oriental profile with the shape of the so called almond-shaped eye, and on the skull it is as if it had a strange hat a Geluk the yellow Tibetan hat, so I felt the need to take it with me. From that moment on, hearing the reverberation of the waves became listening to the murmur of the sea, its song, its cry, the vague glance turned into seeing what before were only fragments of metal became true relics, sacred, strange amulets with their own story and their own message, a magic was settling in and my wandering became a real search, a search for the arcane, like the adventure of a child who still manages to surprise himself and surprise us with his enthusiasm for life.

An artistic reference I think unconscious but that has probably influenced this and perhaps other works is Tony Cragg, with New Stones he has dedicated himself for years to collecting fragments of plastic found on the beaches, he collects them and as they are he composes them in free compositions that can become carpets, maps or a simple object that he uses as a model and repeats with these fragments in a large format. The new nature so called that increasingly submerges us and strongly contributes to the death of our planet, pachamama. The compositions are extremely elegant and I would say delicate, each object inhabits its own precise location and together they build up these precious compositions, all punctuated by extremely calibrated colour nuances. It is true, he makes a poor and polluting element precious but at the same time he puts it in front of us, art is the mirror of society and he is a prophet of it. Another work, always very elegant, is the “Cathedrals”, pieces of crowns from disused car engines that he assembles with painstaking and patient research into a perfect joint, turning them into precious cathedrals.

Giuseppe Fabris