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

Art in America, March, 1993 by Gay Morris

In the 1970s Fabro continued to expand his repertoire of projects. He started a series of maps of Italy in an astonishing array of manners and mediums (to which he has added over the years). Italia cartoccio (Package Italy), 1970, for instance, is a floor piece of wood and lead reproducing the peninsula in 1:1,000,000 scale; Italia d'oro (Golden Italy), 1971, is the nation's shape in gilt bronze, its grandeur subverted because the Italian boot is hung upside down by means of a slip knot around the toe. In Italia del dolore (Italy of Pain), 1975, a road map mounted on canvas, hanging from an iron rod bent to mimic the country's northern border, has been sliced and tangled. In the '70s he also made Iconografie (Iconographies), a piece which consists of a group of large glass basins shown on a long, white-draped, rectangular, Last-Supper-like table. Each dish is filled with water and a lump of heavy glass engraved with the name of a person "for whom violence on the body reflected the violence inflicted on their ideas," Fabro wrote in the catalogue notes. Malcolm X, Crazy Horse, John the Baptist and Pier Paolo Pasolini are among the names, which vary in number each time the work is shown.

Infinitely fighter in spirit was Due nudi che scendono le scale ballando il boogie-woogie (Two Nudes Descending a Staircase Dancing the Boogie-Woogie), one of his most ambitious works of the 1980s. For this installation he encircled a room with colored metal rods forming a band or rail about 7 feet high. Attached to it here and there were slender upright poles that leaned away from the wall, toward the center of the room. In the middle, on the floor, was an accordion-folded steel sheet, the pleats of which were colored red, white, yellow or blue - a combination of hues borrowed from Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie. This represented the staircase. Two sinuous slabs of fleshy pink-white marble - the nudes - rested lightly atop it, one seemingly skidding off onto the floor. In this piece Fabro imaginatively conjoined Mondrian's and Duchamp's very different esthetics while commenting with wit on both of them. I especially liked the nudes, which seemed to be descending in free-fall.

The elements in Due nudi, like so many others in Fabro's art, may find their way into new projects, or the whole Due nudi may be transformed somewhere down the line. One never knows what the future holds for his works or their components, except that they are unlikely to remain static for long. Fabro often accompanies his work with written statements, and in the San Francisco exhibition he provided a handout, headed "I would like to leave a message," in which he attempted to sum up his approach to art. "These works," he said, "are a memory of harmonious solutions, harmonies by which the ear can remain exercised, the eye attentive, and the feelings awake[,] . . . ready for the continual future of artistic acts . . ." With our senses "in motion," he wrote, things can be placed next to one another "so that the result is art." The options are just that open.