Fabrizio Corneli

Born in Tuscany in 1958, he lives and works in Florence. In 1979, he has his first show at the Palace of Exhibitions in Rome, presenting light artworks. He is fascinated by the themes of light and shadow, which become the favorite media of his research.

In the lineage of the Tuscan scientific and artistic tradition, Corneli combines art and science, technology and beauty, abstract reasoning and images. In full daylight, Fabrizio Corneli’s images are barely visible. They are ghostlike apparitions, and appear in the candlelight (or halogen light), in the dark. Fabrizio Corneli cuts sheets of paper (or copper boxes, or egg shells etc. or any other media, because he experiments constantly) on which he directs the light beams. A world of surprising images awakens little by little on the wall, displaying masterpieces of Greek sculpture or of the Italian Renaissance, or at times a fantastic universe of elves and centaurs, dragons and owls, or effigies of young dreamers, silhouettes of exotic travellers.

In order to give life to this enchanting universe, Fabrizio Corneli had to achieve a complete mastery of the optical and physical laws and of all the concepts related to anamorphosis, to projections of shadows and to the refraction of light. In daylight, the spectator cannot imagine what the projections of these abstract silhouettes will look like in the dark. Moreover, the artist himself, when he cut his weird shapes, works "blindly" so to say, because he does not know exactly what the result will be. It all depends on his experience, on his technique and on randomness. His works have been acquired by numerous institutions and important museums in Italy and abroad.