Luciano Fabro

This exhibition of Luciano Fabro’s work inaugurated Paula Cooper Gallery’s representation of the artist’s estate (in conjunction with the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro) and was a significant homage to the Arte Povera sculptor—by his lights, a resolute “heretic” of the movement—who died in 2007 at the age of seventy. Fabro is not a well-known entity in the United States, so it was a pleasure to see a presentation of his singular and contradictory output, which unabashedly incorporates Italian aesthetic traditions, classical history, and high-end design.

The show featured nineteen sculptural pieces produced over a span of thirty-eight years. Works such as Ruota (Wheel), 1964/2001, and Tubo da Mettere Tra i Fiori (Tube to Place Among the Flowers), 1963/2001, both of which employ everyday items that could be bought in any hardware store, were elegant in their facture and material simplicity. In the former, a slender metal circle balances precariously upon a thin steel rod anchored horizontally to the wall. It creates a sense of anticipation, inviting one to envision the calamitous fall of the titular wheel. In the latter, a long steel tube is placed among a group of ordinary houseplants. The tube could be carried around to the homes of friends with flora of their own, so it became a kind of traveling artwork (a useful development, because Fabro didn’t have space for it in his studio).

By the 1970s, more complicated cultural references had come to overlie his art. For one piece, Fabro evoked a tale from Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, holds off a group of suitors by weaving a shroud by day for her father, Laërtes, that she unravels at night, creating a potentially endless project that lasts until her husband returns from his twenty-year absence. For Penelope, 1972, a series of needles, arranged at the top and the bottom of a gallery wall, are threaded with a single piece of fine green silk that runs in a zigzag pattern from floor to ceiling. The work does not narrate or depict but brilliantly evokes this loaded ancient story through austere symbolic association.

Tensions between beauty and kitsch are exacerbated in “Piedi”(Feet), 1968–2000. Two of the works from this series, Piede Senile II and III (Senile Feet II and III), both 2000, called to mind classical columns in their proportions but possess bases that resemble human versions of the namesake appendages. However, in the case of Bronzo e seta indiana (Piede) (Bronze and Indian Silk [Foot]), 1970–85, we were met by a trio of bird claws, patinaed black. The highly polished white-and-gold bronze surfaces of Piede Senile II and III are crafted to appear wrinkled and awkward, each appearing like some malformed giant’s foot. Each column is draped by a pant leg—full of pleats, folds, and ruffles—made from silk and handsewn by Fabro’s seamstress mother. The works are sensuous and ugly, humorous and severe, familiar and alien—indeed, they are paradoxically yet particularly “Italian” in their seriousness and utter Surrealism.

 Perhaps most puzzling was the central section of the show devoted to his “Computer” series, 1988–94. The works seem to have nothing to do with the actual machine, although they are made of industrial materials and employ serial aspects of computerized production in their making. They are crafted from a combination of long steel bars pierced with holes and often feature blocks, chains, and aluminum plates interspersed with colored aluminum poles hung from a single point on the wall. A consummate theoretician, Fabro discussed the titular subject for this body of work: “For me, the computer means to trigger a process in an irresponsible way.” Do the artist’s sculptures critique the overwhelming power of technology? Pay it some kind of oblique tribute? Or was he attempting to “humiliate” this ubiquitous and meddlesome aspect of modern life by turning it into a starved and skeletal version of itself? We will never know, and I imagine that was Fabro’s intention all along.