BERGAMO TXT

Fabrizio Musa belongs to a generation of artists born between the 60s and the 70s, a generation strongly influenced in its behaviours by photos (on paper or digital), computers, television, cinema, advertising and all the other iconographic media of the contemporary today.
His generation, maybe more than any other, has for “modus operandi” a spontaneous pushing towards consuming, producing and modifying real images, combining freedom of expression and a deep knowledge of the tools in use to an acquired critical consciousness.
In Musa's research, the new technologies and the photo medium – used by him as mean for capturing life fragments, because of its experimentation and manipulation potential – are joined together to the most traditional of all languages: the painting.
Focused on reality's reproduction, the artist is aided by various forms of inspiration, knowing that his force of cohesion is born from the constant and rigorous attention to the shape.
It indifferently uses photos that come from his private life (portraits of friends, inner scenes, house objects) passing to the representations of famous architectures (the recent series dedicated to Terragni), to cities' panoramic views until film frames or television.
But in each of these cases he always selects the source image analyzing the light, the objects, the perspectives, focusing himself on every detail.
Musa has the availability of an immense material source that lets him to choose between the more particular and eccentric framing and the simplest, remembering one; daily views rendered with a cut in many cases of cinematographic suggestion.
It begins from the whole image and arrives on canvas, taking the essence of the real thing.
He proceeds, as an ancient said, "the way of taking out", eliminating the colors, the shadows, the shadings and some scene particulars through long and complex passages.
He prints and scan the image chosen, he elaborates it on computer removing all the color information.
On the surface, then, he reduces the pixels that compose the initial frame, using most of the time black and white acrylic colors.
A rigorous and difficult decision, but it works to evidence the plastic aspects snd the image texture of what is represented.
For this recent series the artist has driven the attention in an almost exclusively to Bergamo 's famous exteriors and buildings: the Duomo, the Cappella Colleoni, the door of the City.
He stops on structures, on clear scansion of volumes and surfaces, details stones' two-colour patterns, massive blocks' textures, the geometric eye-candy of architectonic elements.
Almost absent is the presence of human figures.
The only exception is a painting in which three children are forehead to a perron, but in this case we perceive a separation from the small protagonists.
It seems that he sees them as they were of passage: his look doesn't go on emotionality, doesn't paint individualities, or better, not only them; to him they however represent a shape to concentrate on.
His figures are all there, in their presence.
Musa's way becomes another way to perceive the real thing.
From a photo or a frame it gives life to something near real, but also without respecting the original structure.
And his point of view is not born from a willing of fake, but rather from an attempt to picture the only lapse of life lying on the canvas.

Emma Gravagnuolo