A message from Luciano Fabro - Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

Art in America, March, 1993 by Gay Morris

A recent retrospective offered American viewers their first major survey of three decades of work by the Italian sculptor and performance artist Luciano Fabro. Some 60 pieces installed at the San Francisco Museum of modern Art revealed the evolving theatricality - half somber, half playful - of the artist's enigmatic forms.

Luciano Fabro's name is far from unknown in the U.S., but until last fall he had never had a major show of his work in America. That omission was happily corrected by John Caldwell, curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, who organized a retrospective exhibition that included nearly 60 of Fabro's works. The show revealed a prodigiously inventive artist who appears to be motivated more by curiosity and an alertness to the world than by a need to make definitive statements. Fabro's art is not easily classified. Although the San Francisco exhibition was dominated by sculptural objects, they came across as flexible participants in a larger, ongoing drama (it is probably no accident that Fabro has done a good deal of performance art). After creating a piece, Fabro doesn't abandon it. He transforms it, juxtaposes it with other works in unfamiliar ways and, in essence, gives it new roles to play.

Enfasi (baldacchino) (Emphasis [canopy]) is typical. The work was first exhibited in 1982 in Rome, where it consisted of alternating copper and aluminum strips, arranged vertically on a wall, to which Fabro attached copper disks embossed with faces. Gradually the piece changed shape through exhibitions in Kassel that same year, Aachen and London in 1983 and Lucerne in 1991. By the time Enfasi reached San Francisco it had become a huge suspended ceiling piece - a canopy that dominated the rotunda of the museum, making a dramatic, even theatrical, introduction to Fabro's work.

The structure, consisting of a grid some 50 feet square, was draped with panels of brown wrapping paper that fluttered like small flags in the air currents. Within the squares of the grid, and placed so they were partially hidden unless one stood directly underneath and looked straight up, were the copper disks. These resembled monumental Roman coins, battered by age and then revivified with meticulous polishing. Enfasi overflowed with contrasts - the precious-looking metal set against common packing material, the handcrafted embossing against mass-produced paper, the references to Italy's ancient past against the present, the hard copper against the delicate fiber. There was a playful aspect, as well. The faces being partially hidden encouraged the viewer to come away from the edges of the room into the center and be an active participant in the game.

The wit and elegance of Enfasi are typical of Fabro's work. So are the references to past and present, rarefied and commonplace. But Fabro is not always as benign as he was in his glittering canopy. In Demetra (Demeter), 1987, for example, he conjured up the fertility goddess by depicting one part of her body - her lips. Using two huge blocks of gray volcanic rock, he carved out a negative image of lips - a curious imprint, as if the kiss of a giant had burned into the rock. From one corner of the mouth to the other he ran a length of steel cable with its ends bolted together to make a circle that extended through the two blocks of stone. The heavy cable seemed to force the lips apart, sundering what was already a fragment, perhaps suggesting the loss of a classical heritage, of nature's fruitfulness in an industrialized world, or even of civilization itself. It would be hard to read this work in a more positive light. The cable, protruding from the goddess's mouth, looked like an instrument of torture.

Fabro, born in Turin in 1936, is often associated with the Arte Povera artists who emerged in Italy in the 1960s. Although an early member of that heterogeneous group, Fabro did not focus on reduction and the mundane in exactly the way defined by Germano Celant, who organized the first Arte Povera exhibitions. Works like Asta (Pole) and Squadra (Square), both from the mid-'60s, are metal poles that impose themselves on the space around them and which at the same time are defined by that space. The former is a slender steel tube attached to the ceiling that extends - slightly off perpendicular - to within an inch or so of the floor; the latter work consists of two steel tubes joined at a right angle, one end attached to the wall and the other reaching toward the ceiling but stopping short because the weight of the elements distorts the square. It may have been the interaction of these simple forms and the surrounding space that interested Fabro. He has said that his reduction of form in these pieces was not a search for essences (as Celant would have it) but a clearing of the decks, a place from which to build.

And build he did, in a multitude of different directions. In the late 1960s he started the " Piedi" series of fantastic feet that emerge from opulently colored "silk stockings" - long fabric tubes - and which seem to mock the monumental statues of Italy's past, because these feet are often not human. Among the five pieces from the series in the San Francisco show were a foot of brown marble that spread from beneath its beige stocking like a knobbed and knurled fan shell, one of polished bronze in the shape of three talons, and one of pink marble that was as tapered and bony as a fossilized skull of some extinct reptile.