Luciano Fabro at Micheline Szwajcer

Artist: Luciano Fabro

Venue: Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels, Belgium

Date: April 20 – June 4, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels

Galerie Micheline Szwajcer in collaboration with Archivio Luciano and Carla Fabro, are pleased to celebrate one of the most significant artist of the post war period, Luciano Fabro (Turin 1936 – Milan 2007) through an exhibition featuring a set of historical works from the early sixties Luciano Fabro has reactivated in a new version in 2001.

Modern sculpture was born with two works; one undoubtedly of capital importance, Piero Manzoni’s Base del Mondo (Base of the world) of 1961, and another, of diametrically opposite modesty and which I cite with equally great immodesty, my own work entitled Tubo da mettere tra i Fiori (Tube to place among flowers). In the first case it was a method of defining art as the base of nature and not the other way round, as it had been up until then, Schelling permitting. In the second case my own, it was a question of setting out the syncretism between art and nature (…)

When the outdoor sculpture descended from its pedestal to become ornament, embellishment (in this case embellishing the plants), it became pathetic and consequently funeral. So what changed in the method between 1961 and 1963? I can put it in two words: sculpture became an element of relationship. The establishment of a relationship that we now call interactivity and was then called interaction. This interactivity had and still has a raison d’être if it’s positively activated the various poles (at least three): sculpture, nature, person.

Sculpture, as figure of what is meant by work (of art).
Nature, as something that was there before the figure of the work and which now figures more than before.
The person, as vestal virgin who keeps the fire of this interactivity burning.

There appears to be a contradiction, however. The three “methods” need to be tackled in an original way each time. If they lapse into repetition and mannerism they end up filling the environment with works that pollute, by their materiality, much more than works of other genres. I will end by warning that marrying art and nature costs in terms of thought, of character, of creativity, of culture, of filthy lucre, no less than building a cathedral did for our ancestors in the Middle Ages.

Considering that the current situation is disheartening owing
to the reduction of the work to the status of an advertising gimmick
That artists are copying the window dressers who used to copy us
That people are afraid of saying anything sensible about art
That judgment kowtows to success
That valuation kowtows to auctions
That we flee from the Work
Because we are afraid of being left alone with it
Seeing that a lack of mental substantiality is allowing
the material dimension of the work to take over
Seeing that I’m not at all tired of repeating what illuminating such an age
I will start again by giving each Work back the space it once had
I will start again by turning each observer back into an exponent of the work itself
I will start again!

–Luciano Fabro, 2007