Giuseppe Fabris

A "remote" conversation with Nicola Davide Angerame

Nicola Davide Angerame. We speak to talk to each other, to stay together, in a friendly manner, on certain subjects that affect the interlocutors. For Socrates oral dialogue, conversation in which two or more people converse (at a banquet, near a fountain, etc.) around themes rich in "mystery" is the highest form of thought. philosophical, and is also a form of love understood as psychic magnetism, the meeting of asexual souls whose goal is the understanding of the highest ideas. Over the centuries, this tension towards the Metaphysical Good has become an obsession and a main task of the Fine Arts, of great Renaissance painting and Baroque sculpture, of the applied arts and of the avant-garde. The Good as Truth, beyond which it is no longer possible to go back: origin of everything, first principle. In this conversation with Giuseppe Fabris, we touch on some intrinsic aspects and the general significance of his latest work: a series of drawings created in a simple and immediate way using a simple black Tratto Pen tip on thin sheets of paper. white measuring 24x33cm. These are his drawings of the Lockdown.

Giuseppe Fabris. These drawings are one of my free expressions, a flow of (in) consciousness in which the only point of reference, a kind of visual leitmotif, is the tiny figure that returns in the lower part of each drawing.

NDA The fact that this series of works was conceived and produced just before the long period of confinement, between November 2019 and April 2020, makes me reflect on the fact that this too can be, if not a leitmotif, at least a condition of possibility for all these drawings, which therefore come from the same existential situation, the same that we have all tried and that in one way or another we had to face. By abruptly interrupting the relationship with the outside world for a long time, the way opened for a journey into the inner universe. I don't know how long this trip was made, but at some point in the history of the lockdown, around the end of April, there were 4 billion people locked in their homes all over the planet ...

GF Working all at once, practically improvising with the pen on the sheet, the inner universe appears to me most of the time as indefinite, composed of uncertain doodles, lines evoked and interrupted like a doodle made by a child.

NDA It's no accident that you mention the child. I believe that the period of segregation was experienced by many as a phase of regression, sometimes towards childhood, sometimes towards interior dimensions more atavistic than the simple psychological dimension, and can be explored only through this automatic writing already adopted by surrealists and futurists as a moment of liberation from the shackles of logical analysis, vocabulary and syntax of the mother tongue, these being experienced as a prison from which to escape to find a more authentic dimension, far from 'be silent or aphasic but on the contrary hyper-expressive, tumultuous and volcanic. While the surrealists have opted for a regression towards the unconscious, the futurists have decided to accelerate towards the future through an onomatopoeic, almost animal sound-word. You have decided to build your own language which involves writing clusters of signs ...

GF For me, they are like elementary particles, like bosons and neutrinos, in which the movements of the hand, dictated by an obsessive automatism, lead me to immediately construct and deconstruct the images that arise and disappear, until what they come to the surface and I see a "recognizable". Whether it is an object, a face, an animal or whatever it is, it doesn't matter. What matters is the strength with which they impose themselves. It is only then that I decide to insist on their concentration or to leave them veiled under the noise of the signs.

NDA The description of the creative process you just gave me reminds me of the overlapping sounds, the undulations, the dialogues that have just been mentioned, the hidden phrasing, the light, intense and hyper-dynamic emotions that develop within 'a jazz improvisation. As you are also a professional jazz musician, I believe you will agree if I say that your latest production seems to share the frantic jazz rhythm of Charles Mingus and Steve Coleman, while also striking a new balance between primordial chaos and form. defined.

GF This creative process leads me to have to sharpen my gaze to discover many hidden situations to highlight and make them recognizable. It is only by working in this way that I can open this space in which the observer can imagine a story that ultimately remains suspended, undefined.

NDA In fact, these works question the intentionality of the work, its desire to always show something at all costs, even when, as in Minimalism, everything is reduced to a monochrome canvas. Intentionality is in fact one of the cornerstones of the arte itself. Whether abstract or conceptual art, painting, beautiful or ugly, the intentionality of the artist is never lacking. It was only on a few occasions that the surrealists, Jackson Pollock and the Fluxus movement attempted to break the diktat of intentionality, by making chance a valuable ally.

GF After I finished my first drawing in this series, I observed it and a phrase related to a picture occurred to me: "The sleep of reason breeds monsters", from the title of an etching by Francisco Goya, from the Los caprichos series.

NDA In this series, the great Spanish painter has indulged in caricature, reinventing the category of the grotesque in drawing and engraving, to mock and denounce the obscurantism of contemporary Spanish culture which for him is marked by sleep of reason, during which vices and superstitions take the upper hand, in particular those relating to the Catholic religion, experienced as a bigoted faith. In this “mental work”, as he himself asserts in the presentation of the 80 disconcerting plates, Goya, the supporter of the Enlightenment, betrays a visionary character both irritated and critical of his time. work was of the fantastic genre, the society of the time was scandalized to recognize itself. Your drawings are capricious but devoid of moralizing intentions, devoid of any goal. However, many of your previous series of works, which have a lot to do with drawing on paper or empty spaces of all kinds, have always had a very precise identity, a declared and meticulous intention. With a single line, you have always defined slender figures, almost immolated above the altar of nothingness represented by the immaculate background.

GF White and neutral space has always been a dimension that calls out to my drawing and my painting. But it is also much more than that, it is a place that calls to consciousness: everything that shines through on this background (whether it is the word, the drawing, or the painting) leaves a trace, a presence. For a long time I used drawing graphically and I would say analytical, leaving a lot of empty space to read me better, and for the viewer to have as clear a vision as possible of what I meant.

NDA Lucio Fontana taught us that in relation to the void and the empty canvas, the decisive sign can be the one that tears the surface on which this consciousness of the sign appears (or the sign of consciousness would say Jacques Derrida). In your drawings, I think of series like Motus Familiae or those dedicated to Burroughs' Naked Feast or Potlatch, this desire to go beyond the medium was perceptible, as if it pierced or cut it. This also happens in the last series of old photographs recovered from which you take the faces of the people "represented" (in the literal sense of the word) leaving a void in their place, practicing a laying bare of the foundation of the work, as practiced by Fontana.GF At the moment, the improvised and modelless sign represents a warmer and nomadic field of action. With them, I face paradox and confusion, which for me are full of suggested stories that emerge on the surface of our perception.

NDA Each sign has its hand, each hand has its own consciousness. No sign is the same as another: signs are in the realm of the intimate, such as trauma, needs, fingerprints and iris.

GF My sign can be lyrical, cacophonous, analytical, static, logical, paradoxical, poetic, vulgar, sometimes even violent, a violence that becomes interesting once controlled, mastered and tamed in one way or another.

NDA The free sign is a mad horse, it is pure instinct, it is the deepest and most primitive part that speaks. In early childhood, the child draws freely or traces without defining. His drawing is rather a slice of space and crisscrosses it with a frantic back and forth, from top to bottom. In your drawings there always appears a figure which, however small, represents an anchor of salvation, a reassuring presence in the stormy sea of signs. It is also the figure of the spectator ...

GF The man is always the first. It is the leitmotif of these dozens of signs. I let him walk on a path that is not marked; it's like an adventure, like a walk in the woods without paths, like a journey without a destination, like ... the great Voyage of existence and perhaps beyond.

NDA German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote an essay called "Paths interrupted". His love for the Black Forest, where he lived and philosophized for many years, led him to point to this topographical metaphor of interrupted paths found in the woods as one of the most appropriate ways of thinking about the to be in its objectivity; thus transforming the tradition of objectification of metaphysics (from Plato to Nietzsche) into a fundamental ontology of the trace and the horizon. These last two terms can be replaced at home by "sign" and "white sheet" ...

GF Surprisingly, walking in this restricted space of the sheet becomes a stroll in an immense space. It is also thanks to the relationship between space and the medium used to browse it: a fine-tipped marker whose sign represents for me the fine line of synapses, cerebral transmitters that float in the macrocosm of the brain. Likewise, the myriad lines in my designs are the synapses of my unconscious.

NDA Strange unconscious, trying to speak through the language of art. Alejandro Jodorowsky, the great psycho-magician and artist, emphasized how art is the preferred language of the unconscious. Before him, S. Freud had already indicated how unconscious processes were related to visuo-linguistic enigmas of a particular nature: the word retains the same status as the image and vice versa.

GF Being immersed in me, walking or running in the noumenon, also leads me to take an intimate and meditative journey where the unsaid, a hidden image and a story to be recomposed give way to a personal interpretation, but above all they give those who want to take it more time to compose their own story that emerges from these drawings.

NDA Self-analysis of “sign-to-sign”, which expresses the paradox of a conscious ecstasy, a process of self-hypnosis, a domestic and miniature shamanic session. Your drawings link different dimensions of the individual who in this way achieve a complete dialogue on paper. An intuitive dialogue thanks to the force of the images and the background noise of the superabundant signs. This is how I explain the great charm and the attractive force that these small drawings have on those who have already seen them...

GF In this journey into the unknown the definition of Limbo and Bardo coincide, but while the first non-place is driven by anguish and restlessness, in the second (as great minds have taught us) it is possible, thanks to a deep liberation of the spirit, to meet the divinities without fear and with just serenity, whether they are peaceful or wrathful.

NDA You say right: make peace with your own divinities. Each of us has his personal Pantheon: the members of the family experienced as true chthonic or Apollonian forces during our early childhood become the model capable of welcoming the most ancestral representations as well as the gods, martyrs and saints. Surely the first spectator of these drawings, the haloed spectator, is yourself. This drawing therefore becomes a mirror for you: the opaque sheet of paper becomes reflective thanks to the traces it receives. The signs bring out forces, presences, meanings which will appear foreign to us but which we can make our own if it is true that the strength of this instinctive language consists precisely in this: being able to build a bridge between our different personal Pantheons and thus to link our feeling in a common destiny, that of always being, and more and more, enigmas for ourselves. Art, and this type of art that you offer, represents an excellent attempt to trace the traces, these traces left by the divine in us, to bring out the unsaid and the unknown. How useful this proposition is, it's up to each of us, in our own privacy, to understand.

Dolceacqua July 30, 2020