“Imagine”. This is the incipit of all the captions that come along Roberto Fassone’s works on display at Palazzo Collicola. “Imagine surfers thinking about the origins of the universe on the shore of the Pacific Ocean”; “Imagine a boy on the basketball court in Senigallia on a summer evening”; “Imagine a group of collectors gathering to play a game” and so on. What the artist asks us to imagine, however, stands before our eyes. Contradiction, the paradoxical possibility of affirming and simultaneously denying something, runs through the entirety of Concerto, Fassone’s first solo exhibition in a public institution.
Roberto Fassone, “Concerto. L’origine dell’universo”, 2018. Inkjet print on aluminum, 24 x 41.8 x 4.5 cm each (photographs by Riccardo Banfi). Exhibition view at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Photos by Giuliano Vaccai, courtesy the artist and Fanta-MLN, Milan
The invitation to imagination in the exhibition texts is a symptom of a very peculiar attitude that marks the exhibition and, more generally, the artist’s poetics. On one hand we can read the all-encompassing approach to the exhibition moment, not a mere succession of works confined in their temporal dimension but a vital experience (a concert indeed), aimed at directly involving the public, who is addressed in second person. On the other hand, what emerges is the confusion between the world of things and the world of the spirit, between truth and fiction, the abstract and the concrete; a mix-up that is very far from the classificatory rigidity of rationalist thought and so close instead to the logics of magical realism that Fassone insistently looks at. Delving into the mysteries of the imagination and the secret life of things is a way for the artist to challenge the unknown, to break through the veils of the phenomenal and projecting beyond the limits of perception.
Roberto Fassone, “Concerto. Ball Don’t Lie”, 2015-2017. Video, color, sound 16’; “Concerto. Rebel Rebel”, 2016 – ongoing. Dimensions variable. Exhibition view at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Photo by Giuliano Vaccai, courtesy the artist and Fanta-MLN, Milan
Such an attitude can be observed in “Ball Don’t Lie” (2015-2017), a continuous action filmed by a fixed camera and reproduced in the exhibition as such; here the artist entrusts his destiny to a basketball. It is the outcome of the attempt to hit the basket that gives an answer, affirmative or negative, to the questions that torment the artist. “Imagine not having answers in the inside and looking for them in the outside”: this is how Fassone describes the atavistic desire to press into the future and look ahead of time on the threshold of the forthcoming. This profound belief in the value of chance, of fate, to which significant qualities are assigned, returns in “Ombretta Marie” (2024), an enchanted billiard table, on whose surface lays the possibility of a change of course. A brass plaque next to one of the corner holes reads: “every time the ball falls into this hole a person changes direction”.
Roberto Fassone, “Concerto. Charades”, 2016. Video, color, sound, 20’; photographic print, 70 x 100 cm (photograph by Riccardo Banfi). Exhibition view at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Private collection. Photograph by Giuliano Vaccai, courtesy the artist and Fanta-MLN, Milan
It is once again to the universe of game that Fassone turns to dissect the contradictions of the art system: he does so with an attitude free from any solemnity, frank, an amused provocation, never boastful. It is also the case of “Charades” (2016), a mime game in which a group of collectors challenge each other in guessing the art works imitated by the artist: whoever wins takes with him the video and photographic documentation of the action, accompanied by its authenticity certificate. Solemnity is dragged into futility, art into distraction: art collecting does not come out unhurt, induced to denounce its tacitly competitive nature, nor do mimed works, reduced to necessarily stereotyped gestures. The reflection on language and on the mechanisms that regulate the art system returns in “Concerto. La notte scende sul Mar Rosso; Il tramonto sul Mar Nero; Bussola; Un quadrato e due Rettangoli” (Concerto. Night falls on the Red Sea; Sunset over the Black Sea; Compass; A square and two rectangles) (2020), in which a 1x1m print is divided into two chromatic halves, one red and one black. Depending on its orientation, the painting changes its meaning, suggested by the title which adapts each time. The allusion to conceptual linguistic mechanisms, which are crucial to the Fassone method, is here imbued with that irreverent and yet carefree spirit that we have already found in “Charades”.
Roberto Fassone, “Concerto. Ombretta Marie”, 2024. Oak varnished in grain, embroidered fabric, hand-sewn leather holes, brass plate, 230 x 130 x 78 cm. Exhibition view at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Photo by Giuliano Vaccai, courtesy the artist and FANTA, Milan (with the support of Milesi Biliardi)
It is with extreme genuineness that the artist affirms and relies on the relativism of any attempt to interpret the external world, which is subject to constant mutation. After all, the instability of signs and meanings, the interest in constant metamorphosis, entirely defines the practice of the artist, who gets directly involved: every spring Fassone retitles all the works he produced in the past, in the chimerical attempt to update the information circulating on the web, reprint catalogues and modify certificates of sold works. “I have had in me thousands of philosophies, not any two of which — as if they were real — agreed” wrote Fernando Pessoa in his esoteric pages. With the Portuguese writer Fassone shares an interest in those mysteries that are inaccessible to human rationality, as well as the enviable ability to remain open to transformations, second thoughts, oblivions.
Roberto Fassone, “Concerto. La notte scende sul Mar Rosso; Il tramonto sul Mar Nero; Bussola; Un quadrato e due rettangoli”, 2020. Photographic print 100 x 100 cm. View of the exhibition at Palazzo Collicola, Spoleto, 2024. Photo by Giuliano Vaccai, courtesy the artist and Fanta-MLN, Milan
From the unusual biographies of the artist uploaded on the web, we can deduce the desire to escape a coercive self-definition, which is often necessary for the promotion of the self. One of these reads: “As of today, Monday 1 February 2021, his favorite artist is Paola Pivi”. Tomorrow who knows. Even identity becomes a serious game, a constant questioning of the self, as it was for Pessoa who enjoyed entertaining himself in exchanges of letters with his multiple alter-egos. In this perspective we can also read “Rebel-Rebel” (2016), a bottle of Coke and a bottle of Pepsi resting on the floor of Palazzo Collicola in very close contact with each other. One contains the liquid of the other. “Imagine two friends out for a walk exchanging souls”: this is how the work is described by Fassone, for whom rebellion consists in an irreverent manipulation of labels, of those categories that define the self and the world. His first solo show at Palazzo Collicola excellently reflects the singular spirit that guides him in his approach to artistic work, a unique case in the Italian art scene, without falling into the temptation of a classificatory reductionism which, in Fassone’s case, would prove to be completely against nature.
Benedetta Casini
Info:
Roberto Fassone, Concerto
curated by Saverio Verini
28/06/2024 – 3/11/2024
PALAZZO COLLICOLA
piazza Collicola 1, 06049 Spoleto PG
www.palazzocollicola.it
is a contemporary art magazine since 1980
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