ÆTERNA
Fabio Pellicano Rome and the Roman world
The exhibition that Fabio Pellicano dedicates to Rome, or rather to Romanity, begins from the dialogue between form and light.
Classical statues photographed entirely enveloped in light, which takes on its own thickness, can be admired in all their completeness and plasticity, as if they were in movement. Combined with archaeological finds and monuments represented as architecture that bears witness to a great past, but deprived of the drama of loss, as structures in their own right, where shape and proportions are the only creators of such beauty.
Thanks to the sophisticated and complex techniques used by Pellicano, infrared, use of special lenses, slowed exposure times and, above all, the skilful use of light - almost a constructive element - the photographs on display give us a classic but unusual, colder Roman feel and tidy, almost timeless.
A bridge between the old way of perceiving the ancient, dear to the twentieth century, where fascination was stimulated by the fragment and the find, and a new way of looking at the works of the past, more willing to accept the value of beauty in its form also if contaminated or partial. The artist thus testifies to us the great ability of this ancient metropolis to regenerate itself and continue to be a protagonist even in the current imagination.
Patrizia Piccioli
Fabio Pellicano
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Fabio Pellicano is a painter and a photographer .
Born in Rome in 1965. Passionate about nature, architecture, archeology and astronomy. He has organized several exhibitions on the theme of the loss of the biodiversity, conservation of cultural heritage and the fast changing of the envinroment due to human activities using different medias as painting and photography.
He collaborates with W.W.F. WORLD WILDLIFE FUND and SAVE THE OLIVES.
As an abstract Painter he blends automatic gestures, drawings and intuitive color choices to express his depth unconscious.
He is the great grandson of Francesco Maria Pellicano, member of the first Italian parliament, and Clelia Romano Pellicano, known as "Jane Gray", a politically engaged writer and journalist of the early 1900s, she being the granddaughter of General Giuseppe Avezzana who fought for Italian independence with italian national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi. Having graduated in Political Science, in 1990 he moved to Paris to work as graphic designer for Walt Disney until 1993. After which, Fabio decided to dedicate himself full time to being an independent artist.
He lives and works in Italy between Rome and Tricase
Photo Leda Calza
EXHIBITIONS
August 2023 Lo spazio e il tempo Tricase
November 2019 Arthus Gallery Bruxelles
December 2018 ''Animalmente'' Centro studi Cappella Orsini Rome Italy
September 2018 Vanishing Giovinazzo
March 2017 Ventoblu Gallery Polignano a Mare Italy.
November 2016 Arthus Gallery Bruxelles Belgium
March 2016 Philippe Heim Gallery Pavillon Des Arts et Design Paris France
Octobrer 2015 SABEXPO Ancienne Nonciature au Sablons Bruxelles Belgium.
May 2015 Galerie Boyrie ANTIQ'ART Salon des Antiquaires et de l'Art contemporain de SAINT-JEAN CAP FERRAT France.
November 2014 François d'Ansembourg Antiquities Bruxelles Belgium.
March 2014 La Verand'Anne "Esprits de la montagne" Gstaad Switzerland.
May 2012 Gallery Idearte Ferrara Italy.
October 2011. Arthus Gallery Bruxelles Belgium.
March 2011 Sells a painting at Sotheby’s Milan Italy.
October 2010 Museo Crocetti Rome Italy.
Juin 2010 Gallery Spazio Palmieri 30 Lecce Italy.
March 2010 Cultural Centre Les ecuries de Waterloo "Paradise Lost" Waterloo Belgium.
November 2009 Signature Member Artists for conservation.
May 2009 Spazio libero Gallery Milan Italy.
October 2008 Galleria del circolo artistico Bologne Italy.
June 2007 Cafmeyer Gallery Knokke-Heist Belgium.
May 2006 Michel Vokaer Gallery "Au-delà du trait" Bruxelles Belgium.
August 2005 Spazioarte Kube Gallipoli Italy.
October 2005 Biscari palace "Song of the earth" Catane Italy.
June 2004, Il Grifone Gallery "Recent works" Lecce Italy.
August 2004 "Oltre i confini del segno" Palace Gallone Tricase Italy.
October 2003 Sagebrush Gallery Ketchum Sun Valley (U.S.A.)
August 2003 Artists for peace The nights of the Tarantula Melpignano Italy.
2002 Il Ponte Gallery S. Costantino Calabro-Vibo Valentia Italy.
October 2002 Il Grifone Gallery Lecce Italy.
February 2001 Tempietto Gallery "The Colors of Light Brindisi Italy.
December 2000 Memmo Foundation "Light and Memory"Lecce Italy.
June 2000 Spazio Mauro Mori Milan Italy
August 2000 Casa de la Uniòn Palma de Mallorca Spain.
August 1999 Villa La Meridiana "Orientalism in Leuca" Santa Maria di Leuca Italy.
August 1998 Trono Hall Gallone Palace "Two Painters and Salento" Tricase Italy.
February 1996 Les écuriesd’Hesdin “The Garden of Eden" with Pierre Klossowski, Raymond Mason, Enrico Bay, De Rosa and Régis Deparis Hesdin France.
May 1994 George V Gallery "The four elements” Paris France.
CRITICS
Banished from paradise
Banished from paradise, what does it mean to lose paradise?
Who loses paradise? Only one’s gaze is capable of replying to the sense of loss, only with the eyes one witnesses what goes towards the inexistence of loss. There are, in fact, closed eyes that do not see themselves in paradise, because they die; there are eyes remained open, that, just the same, do not see paradise, because they do not know how to look at it.
Perhaps the tragedy of a lost paradise is in the eyes that, although open, no longer know how to look in a paradisiac way.
Paradise is really lost for the eyes that do not see it, not for the eyes that have died from within: their end coincides, without adhering to it, with the end of oneself as a paradise.
The real loser, for what he has lost, is, then, man’s gaze, which cannot see an otherness which is so intimate and introvert that it constitutes his archetype, thus definable as paradise.
Paradise is, in fact, not a place, but a primigenial condition of place, the birth place, from which one comes, from which one is not separated, to which one returns: paradise is, then, the place where the gaze pursues its mirage, the gaze continues wanting to see as a vision, the closed eyes return to see as nostalgia or enchantment, remembered in what was already seen in the past, perhaps before being born to sight.
In a word, paradise is the condition of intimacy, in which even ferocity is translated with the maternal language of birth and nutrition. It is true: a tiger runs to catch its prey, but the animal that is caught becomes its food, which is transformed into food to be passed on. There are others, springing from her as progeny, which feed themselves in order to go where the mother tiger will not be able to reach them later, not even for recognition.
To lose paradise, therefore, does not mean that paradise is lost but that we lose the condition to live in paradisiac harmony. Without which life is transformed into an aimless search or into boredom without possibilities, or into reality without the connotation of the marvellous.
A society without the marvellous becomes an orphaned mass deprived of paradise: it is its remembering it or its making utopias of it, which makes life a search for shelter, as a landing-place of comfort. There is no image of tenderness that does not refer back to a remembered paradise; there is no reconquered happiness that is not within the refinding of a lost paradise; in conclusion, there is no more frustrating and bored emptiness than that of living according to the reasoning the after day, after paradise which is finished, destroyed.
The human eye has nothing to scrutinise, because there is nothing on which its gaze can remain; it remains on what it evokes, it carries us back to a happy state already looked at, whose span of time, inclusive, dense and similar is temporality which has returned to the eternal return of paradise which has come back and been refound.
When paradise is lost, however, the eye abdicates its tension for looking in order to rediscover: it cedes its quiet and contemplative pulsating to the click of a photograph, which reduces, closes the corporeal like an object to be kept without saving it, to be deposited without bringing it to life, removing it from its environment without becoming familiar with it.
A photograph has the limit of making the object adhere to its condition, necessarily communicating its being an epigone of what is lost without paradise.
Pellicano’s painting translates the immobility of the click of the photograph into a living image, inside which the concrete is overturned in intimacy, in an objectivated attitude: and so it happens that a man’s gaze does not gaze, the photographic diaphragm does not focalise, because the visual eye of the inhabitants of the lost paradise, lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, captures the scene.
Thanks to them, as they speak from within the pictorial representation of Pellicano, the gaze recaptures its seeing power, its expressive truth, a calm ranquillity without boredom, without anguish, emotional symptoms of one who looks from without at the paradisiac loss.
If the lion photographed loses its roar, Pellicano’s painted one fails to roar: in paradise there is no prey, but animals to live with in peace, in harmony. The artist gives back to the animals a look of tenderness, in which paradise continues to live not as a landscape, but as gesture; not as exotism but as a familiar place which has never been lost, since God created paradise with the trees, with the animals which lived in it.
Man left paradise, tried to tame the animals so that they at least might repay with their songs of paradise, which he had lost: he fences off zoos, cages, model stables, he films “habitats”, photographs places where paradise may remain at least as dens, nests, the call to live, as it always had been, since its origins, is in paradise.
But the more man fences off, the more paradise conceals itself to the point of not existing; the more he photographs, the more paradise abandons the region, the area, for paradise is harmony, where one can live in a paradisiac way.
Only in art does paradise remain as a trace: it is in the gaze of animals, in the calm way in which they look at man, who replies to that gaze, on the contrary, in the disquieting way, in the discomfort of a lost good and which man wants to possess or fence off.
Observing how the lions in Pellicano’s pictures seem to me to gaze, an existential discomfort is depicted in my soul, typical of someone who has lost the meaning itself of lost. In fact, does not “to lose” mean to make of one’s life a pilgrimage-like research to be once more inside what has been lost and that one wants this to return?
In the opinion of man who has cast out of paradise, even the animals that had never lost it are considered cast out: because they are inhabitants who are never driven out and, therefore, are part of paradise. Man who has been expelled, expels them in his turn. That is the meaning of the calm, questioning gaze in the profound eyes of Pellicano’s animals with the black of their pointed pupils, intensified in the almost oval yellow of the edges of their eyes. A lost or a refused paradise? That is the question.
I prefer to answer: refused. After all, the non-tragic gaze of Pellicano’s tigers does not refer to any awareness of loss, but rather to the indifference, the lack of compassion towards those who are expelled.
The loser is man who goes astray without paradise. In fact, the labyrinth takes the place of paradisiac familiarity of space and time: the labyrinth and feeling homeless are the same thing, like exile and the waste land.
The desolation of the after day, before which man hypocritically closes his eyes so as not to face the depth of the abyss, from whose compassion paradise looks at him without letting itself be seen.
This drama of looks is called non-existence. A way of living one’s responsibility: is it not better to convince ourselves that paradise has never existed, so as to console ourselves in the fact that we have lost nothing?
This is certainly an easy way of thinking, to which modern life accustoms us. After all, is it not with the death of paradise that we wear its fur, with the illusion that we are warming the cold that we feel? The cold that comes from within our being men, now orphans and even superfluous inside the labyrinth.
Carlo Alberto Augeri