Fabio Viscogliosi’s Selected Poems appear in black and white, their primordial state, in a deliberately bare presentation. We are invited to join the artist in an intimate space: the source of his imagery, where things softly begin to take form. Here, Fabio shows his world as it is: open and unguarded, where his drawings, paintings, books and music emerge as creations, and at the same time circle back as new sparks of inspiration.
Three large paintings open like portals to Viscogliosi’s inner world, which is much like our own, only more playful and full of possibilities. Beneath the apparent stillness of these scenes, runs a current of creative energy, reflected across some thirty drawings pinned to the walls.
Those drawings unfold like a poetic diary: inspired by intuitive flow rather than rational will, they are snapshots of small, fleeting events. A cup, a cloud, a dog, a gesture, inanimate elements that might go unnoticed to many of us, become characters full of life through Fabio’s tender bricolage. The artist plays with the memories they hold and the sensations they reflect, bringing them into dialogue and forming scenes where objects and gestures meet.
Fabio recognises in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind an echo of his own creative process: that mythical thought which gathers the traces, fragments and residues found in everyday life to build new narratives that give a sense of order to the world. His work, too, draws on fragments of life and returns them transformed, as glimpses of a world both impossible and true.
This openness holds a willingness to share his creative flow and allow us to become part of it. In our reading, two threads seem to resonate across his universe: the mystery of life, sometimes embodied by dice, playing cards or detective-like figures; and the bliss, found in the small pleasures of the day to day, the cozyness of a cup of tea, the joy of a walk, or a conversation with a cloud.
Fabio makes his own the words of the song by The Kinks: « Breeze blows leaves of a musty-coloured yellow, So I sweep them in my sack, Yes, it’s my autumn almanac ». We, as spectators, are invited to collect our own leaves: to look, to play, and to let new stories take shape in our imagination.
Curated by: Óscar Florit. Text by: Madi Canals
