The doors open and we enter L21’s Room 5. Before we know it, we find ourselves walking through the “Palazzo” that Fabio Viscogliosi has created for us. A palace with gleaming floors and greenish walls where a series of paintings with a strong cinematographic character will accompany us throughout the visit, as if they were ancient tapestries.

The green walls on which some of the paintings hang emphasise the scenic character of the exhibition, where the same colour that has been used on the canvases escapes from them to invade the space, in the same way that a soundtrack invades the room and makes us disappear from our own world to inhabit a much more attractive and exciting one for a short period of time.

Each of the paintings that we come across along our journey through the Palace seem to tell us very different stories. Just as when we choose a title from the billboard when we go to the cinema, it is up to the spectator to choose which painting to stand in front of, and to imagine the multiple narrative possibilities that the work offers us.

In “Rocky landscape” an imposing rock formation, worthy of any John Ford “Western”, seems to await the arrival of a band of outlaws covered from the nose down in dark bandanas under the blazing midday sun somewhere in the Arizona desert, riding at full speed and carrying sacks of money after a bank robbery.

“Paradiso”, the largest painting in the exhibition, seems to depict a meeting between a medieval lord and his vassal, perhaps to honour him after a great feat of war and with the aim of knighting him. While in “Rainbow Man” we can see a subject straight out of Al Capone’s own gang, heading towards some part of the city with the invisible but present pistol hidden under his long green coat.

Finally, we meet the solitary Jacques Cousteau-like character from “Bagno Paradiso”, looking out over the ocean at sunset, enjoying the last few hours of calm on land before setting off on a new ocean adventure in the morning.

With his characteristic style of flat colours, delimited by a vibrant line that envelops everything, and with a strong comic influence that can also remind us of the cinematographic story board, the artist builds a series of “Palazzos” and gives us the key to all of them so that we can wander through their corridors and rooms, escaping for a moment from our reality to live other stories.

Enrique Suasi

“The afternoon was intimate, infinite. The road descended and forked among the now confused meadows. A high-pitched, almost syllabic music approached and receded in the shifting of the wind, dimmed by leaves and distance.”¹

A garden is a landscape shaped by the aesthetic gaze. It is the route designed for the autumnal walk and the place to encounter nature customised to our tastes. Natural elements coexist in it: the light, the rocks, the plants, the singing of the birds in the trees and the wind. Built elements also feature there: the path, the pond, and the flowerbed that tries, in vain, to contain and mark out the boundaries of the space. In a similar way, Fabio Viscogliosi arranges these two types of elements – the built and the natural – on the canvas, in his new paintings. By doing so, he becomes a kind of landscape gardener, an architect, who masters the equilibrium of the shapes, a walker capable of getting lost in the depths of the two dimensions of his paintings. The characters that appear in them await, in a contemplative stance. The wall of “Studio afternoon”, for example, features three paintings and a window through which plants appear, as if the landscape were there undercover, like a secret that bursts into the room… perhaps a call that the artist himself heard.

The Garden, a simple and powerful word to my ears. It imposed itself on me during this long spring as I was working on the 20 paintings that line up on the walls of the L21 gallery. The titles emerge in the same impetus as the forms, according to a playful intuition, early in the morning, while the hand moves ahead of consciousness. Perhaps I had in mind The Garden of Forking Paths, this short story by Borges, whose title is one of the finest in all of literature, or a distant song from the Kinks. Or was it the urge to escape into nature? I do not know anymore.

In some form, a garden is domesticated nature and a landscape designed to our tastes. It offers a non-functional window of time and space, which facilitates aesthetic contemplation. As a location, a garden is full of artistic and literary echoes; it also has deep symbolic roots that sink into the land. It therefore comes as no surprise that it is one of the major themes in western painting. However, gardens are not just places of collective memory, they are also strictly personal. In the words of Fabio Viscogliosi,

Our memory is also a garden, a labyrinth whose familiar and intriguing, mysterious and exhilarating paths we traverse. As a teenager, I liked to escape into my grandparents’ garden, in the dampness of the Lazio in Italy. At nap time, while everyone stood quietly in the shade, I wandered between the tomato plants and the sun-streaked bamboo forest. Anything could happen.

In fact, anything can happen in the artist’s paintings too, enclosed in the garden – this symbolic space, which is at once internal and external. From contemplating a geometrical night to walking around the almost metaphysical sculptures of “Tree sculpture” or “Aquarium”, as if one could go around their negative space and look at them from behind. The space in the painting invites one to imagine the void, which opens up the necessary distance for that aesthetic contemplation that makes it possible to talk about landscape rather than tree, mountain, cloud and sun. In short, what can be found in Fabio Viscogliosi’s new paintings is a visual poetry of space.

I often have the impression that a painting is born in reaction to the previous one. Each is the product of a double movement, dazzling and patient, in balance. Each is punctuated by the hours of its own appearance. Each is a play area circumscribed by the black line of its frame. And yet, all of them fit into a space that extends far beyond themselves. I like it to be that way.

A two voices text between Fabio Viscogliosi and Esmeralda Gómez Galera

Lyon / Palma 2020

Translation by Carla Davidson

Fabio Viscogliosi, born in Oullins (France) in 1965, lives and works between Lyon (France) and Geneva (Switzerland).

His artistic practice is focused on painting and drawing and inspired by different influences like comics, literature, burlesque cinema or graphic design. His artworks are usually untitled or named after songs and quotes from his favorite books and movies. Actually, the sentence by Robert Bresson «Not to use two violins when one is enough » is also a good statement to describe his work as an artist.

He has shown his work in places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (Lyon), Museum of Decorative Arts (Paris), Galerie du Jour – Agnès B. (Paris), and at the Intermediatheque in Tokyo. He has also participated in ARCO Madrid (2018, 2019 and 2020) with L21 Gallery. His last solo show at L21 Gallery was “Home recordings” (2019).

He has also published several novels in France –Apologie du Slow (Stock, 2014) or Mont-Blanc (Stock, 2011) which has been translated into Italian and Japanese. He received the Prince Pierre de Monaco award for his book Je suis pour tout ce qui aide à traverser la nuit (Stock, 2010). In 2015, he wrote a fiction about a picture by Fischli & Weiss (Les Hors-la-loi, Confluences/FRAC Aquitaine). He also made comic books (Da Capo, L’association, 2010) and art zines, like the current Belvédères series in duet with Luca Retraite.

As a musician, he has recorded Spazio (2002), and Fenomeno (2007), and has collaborated with artists like Amedeo Pace (Blonde Redhead) or Vanessa Paradis. His last record, Peplum, came out in 2019.

¹Borges, Jorge Luis. “Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings”. Translated by Donald A. Yates. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions. 1964. Pages 19–29.

While I was working on these paintings I listened to a lot of music, including the demos and home recordings of Bob Dylan and Robert Smith (who are two of my favorite musicians). I’ve always liked home recordings, with their raw sound, without tricks, very simple and direct.

I realized that my painting process was similar, like writing a journal, day-to-day recordings. These paintings are made on a raw canvas, with only two colors, black and red, as two instruments that intertwine. They have something very direct and they are as honest as I could make them. What interests me is to capture variations from one painting to another. I often work in series. And I wanted the exhibition to look like an album of home recordings, a series of daily recordings. (Recording of course echoing here, for me, the word ricordo, which means memory in Italian.)

It also brings me back to this idea, which seems to me primordial today, that a painting is an object made by hand on the scale of the one who produces it. The work of an amateur, in the noble sense of the term. The artist (like the amateur or the do-it-yourselfer) works with what surrounds him, what he finds and collects as forms, objetcs, remains and fragments which he incorporates into his painting, at that precise moment. Unlike the majority of images around us, over-produced for the screen, edited and retouched via photoshop, the painting remains a singular object, which incorporates the moment and the peculiarities of said moment.

What we then look at in the exhibition are the traces of these lived moments. What interested me too with these paintings was to mix figures with a certain form of abstraction so that the two merge and unite. Whether it is a character, a shoe, a cloud, or an abstract form, a line or a spiral; all of it is made of the same material: painting. A way to reconvene the figure and the subject, while considering them as pure forms, a line. My work has long revolved around this idea of the fair and vibrant layout, what Shitao, in his Comments on Painting, called “the truth of the only brush stroke”.

The titles of the works also go in this direction, simple and descriptive, as if we were sticking a label on the paintings to list them and remember them later. “Portrait”, “Shoe”, “Studio”, “Landscape”, “Truck”, “Hand and card”; they are reduced to the subject itself, ontological and descriptive, the word and the thing, the pattern and the idea, gathered in the painting.

Notes for Home Recordings, Fabio Viscogliosi