Bormio

FABRIZIO MUSA BORMIO - NEW YORK

TWO PLACES, ONE TIME

The works of Fabrizio Musa published in this book depict two places, but they
refer to one, same time.

Bormio and New York, as is well known, do not resemble each other. It may be, however, that in the 14th cent,
when as many as thirty-two towers towered within its walls, the Valtellina town appeared
to the eyes of medieval man endowed with a skyline similar to that of the metropolis
United States. And on the other hand, the neo-Gothic character of some New York skyscrapers
does not seem to recall the sharp linearity of mountain churches?
Probably of unexpected and daring similarities one could identify others,
but it would prove a futile and perhaps even misleading exercise. The Bormio-New
York should be read not architecturally but chronologically, and to be precise in the light
of a certain idea of the relationship between time and image.
New York panoramas have been appearing in Musa's paintings for at least a decade: that is, since
when the Larian painter began to spend increasingly longer periods in the city
overlooking the Atlantic, where he forged relationships with galleries and private collectors,
and in which he oversaw the creation of the interiors of a famous restaurant - the Per
Lei in Manhattan - which permanently houses his works. Bormio, on the other hand, has been a
regular vacation destination since his adolescence, the classic resort not too far from home
that, for the artist, possesses the traits of an unmistakable landscape, familiar and at times
even intimate.

Yet it is as if, in order to observe these places, Musa feels the need to lay there a
gaze first and foremost detached, as if he felt the need for a mediation
technology that in the first instance makes them appear uniform. The photographs from which the
paintings are in fact scanned and subjected to the same process of translation
into a text language-the so-called "txt," or "text only," by which the files are designated,
and which appears as a logo alongside the title of many of the Larian artist's works-which
strips them down, strips them bare, reduces them to a skeletal two-tone. This is not only an
iconic transformation, but - I repeat - also a chronological one: it is as if those images,
and the places to which they refer, are hinged in an identical juncture, as if they
they are purged of the flow of events and immobilized in the same instant. This is
of the homogenized time typical of the phenomenon that we usually call "globalization."
a single, undifferentiated time, just as undifferentiated tend now to be all
the images that are poured onto our communication tools.

Musa accepts this process, which is moreover unstoppable, but lays it bare, and then
sabotage it from within. Temporal fixity is counterpointed by optical mobility, the
tremor that belongs to certain details of the paintings in which the weave of signs is so dense
as to produce a vibration in the eye of the beholder. Finally, the color that, especially
in the beautiful papers devoted to views of Bormio, covers in an arbitrary and poetic way
the skeleton of the images, sets time in motion again, makes it perceived through the
calculated imprecision and the marked gesturality of the writing.

Roberto Borghi