Fabio Viale
White marble and pigments, 181x161x116 cm
"The artist caught the jury's consensus in that his work, in addition to having an accomplished formal composition, uses one of the material-symbols of the Italian art tradition, while enacting a strong perceptual disorientation that engages and stimulates the empathy of the observer."
He was born in 1975 in Cuneo, Italy. Lives and works in Turin.
Exhibitions include:
Assonanze/Dissonanze, Italian Cultural Institute, New York 2013,
Primo piano d'artista, Museo del Novecento, Milan 2012.
Fabio Viale's sculpture experiments with the possibilities of the material in a rigorous manner, he measures himself against tradition achieving disorienting and surprising results that demonstrate how the most extreme and improbable thought can be formalized. Marble, a medium and at the same time an idea, a heavy, severe material, as ancient as it is precious, becomes light, dynamic, ductile, as anonymous as an industrial by-product or a singular reproduction of great masterpieces.
Exemplary are the works in which the marble takes the form of a balloon, a paper airplane, a styrofoam skull and even a fully functioning boat. The sculpture The Supreme, two overlapping and enlarged colored marble boxes, is a monument to an everyday object reproduced in minute detail, on which are imprinted the marks from which the work's title is derived. A paradoxical image that creates a perceptual deception in the viewer because of the executive accuracy with which the artist repurposes the original material (wood). His is a mimetic procedure that through skill and very high technical control gives new qualities to marble consistent with its tradition of use.