Fabio's Ashes
The exhibition offers a space bringing together a set of works on disappearance, memory, and repair. A single visual dramaturgy links them: each work emerges from a drama marked by destruction and loss, and brings to light what remains present despite absence, thus opening the possibility of a reconciliation with loss.
A Photographic Allegory
At the entrance to the route, an arch marks a threshold between two regimes of experience. In passing through it, the visitor leaves a reality governed by utility, immediacy, and the ordinary succession of time to enter a space where forms, materials, and images open onto another depth of reality. The arch thus prompts a shift in the regime of attention and invites the visitor to become open to what, in sensory experience, exceeds the mere appearance of things.
The visitor enters a chamber dominated by white, at the centre of which a long table holds an expanse of linen densely covered in text, inviting the visitor to lean in and read, while photographic fragments are arranged on either side. The whiteness links the works while accentuating their differences of material, surface, and scale; shreds, lacunae, and inscriptions compose a place marked by the fragmentary image and encrypted speech.
Two arches placed close together mark the passage to the rest of the exhibition. They create a transitional space charged with the mystery that precedes the discovery of a place one can imagine long withdrawn from view. This pair of arches acts as a threshold, preparing the visitor for a more intense quality of presence. Like an archaeologist, the visitor is about to enter the chamber of a funerary monument and reach the heart of the drama.
At the end of the route, the black chamber takes the form of a cenotaph. Five portraits of Fabio appear as so many possible faces for a single beloved being, now gone. This space calls for quiet contemplation and gives presence to absence. The low light, the alignment of the portraits, and the unexpected softness of the pink background lend the whole a dimension one might call sacred: a place where memory can welcome Fabio and transform loss and rupture into peace and continuity.
Works in Detail
La storia
La storia carries the narrative of Les cendres de Fabio, a story set in Rome whose imaginative world has several ties to Antiquity. The text of the novel linked to the exhibition is reproduced in full on a seven-metre length of linen, each line running the full width of the cloth. Unfolded in this way, the narrative can be taken in at a single glance, like a photograph, while continuous reading becomes almost impossible. The text then becomes a territory to traverse: the gaze pauses freely on a word, a passage. For anyone who has already read the novel, certain moments of the story resurface here and there, like the memories stirred by leafing through a photo album.
Le cineri
Le cineri originates in the story of Maria Motti, a highly gifted photographer who, after her breakup with Fabio, destroys the whole of her work. Her brother manages to save a few fragments of torn and burned photographs. They come from a series devoted to a white shirt, that of her lost lover, photographed from a bird's-eye view. This viewpoint turns the shirt into an abstract composition evoking an Arctic landscape: its folds become reliefs and form a set of snowdrifts inhabited by silence, cold, and desolation. The fragments are restored using an approach inspired by that used for ancient frescoes, which recomposes what can be recomposed while leaving the lacunae visible. The works thus bear at once the trace of destruction and that of the care given to what survived.
Fabio
Fabio moves through the story as an essential yet elusive presence. We know he mattered deeply to Maria, but very little makes it possible to pin down his features. The series therefore offers five possible versions of his face, each an attempt to approach the one who remains elusive and is now out of reach. Each portrait is a different way of reconstructing Fabio from memory, love, and imagination. The coexistence of five versions keeps open the question of his true face and reveals the many forms an absent person can take when he survives only through the memories of others.
Series: 10 works
Titles: Paysage no 1, Paysage no 2, etc.
Dimensions: 30,5 x 30,5 cm
Edition: 21 variants
Collage of photographic fragments on board. Pigment print on Harman Gloss FB AI baryta paper, 350 g/m²
Dimensions: 1 x 7 meters
Edition: 5
Screen print on linen
Series: 5 works
Titles: Fabio, as he remained in Maria's memory, as he might have appeared, etc.
Dimensions: 23 x 35,5 cm
Edition: 21 variants
Photographic transfer on wood, painted highlights, and 23.5-carat gold leaf gilding