THE GLIMMER AND THE SHADOW

Fabiana Imola

 

Floral compositions and mosaics with dried foliage, arabesques covered in thorns and Chinoiserie drawings, volutes of polychromed iron and saw-like forms, metal showers and carbonized trunks, installations with branches and mesmerizing openwork pieces—these are some of the ways Fabiana Imola pays homage to nature, and specifically, to the plant world. It's a long journey where recurrences are as significant as changes; because, although everything seems to indicate that this work is like a snake biting its tail, the figure of the spiral is more fitting than that of the circle, where each curve and each new departure from the initial point is accompanied by an inevitable torsion. Several years ago, Fabiana created openwork metal pieces depicting branches, antlers, and insects, which she installed on walls, in turn generating shadows and reflections. Their negatives, an infinitude of tiny planes, were arranged, like other equally suggestive forms, on glass panes resting on wooden ingots.

However, this chapter, seemingly closed around 2016, recently reverberated again. A set of elongated glass panes with polished edges serves as a support for a new series that could initially be seen as eminently semiotic or scriptural, although a closer look at these sheets covered by small fragments of shining steel also reveals silhouettes of insects and crustaceans, branches and leaves, small marine and underwater landscapes.

Initially conceived for display on bookstore shelves as if they were illustrated book covers, they have now found a new life alongside small metal sculptures that, likewise, derive from the negatives or interiors of numerous and diverse creations from the recent past. But alongside this crystal library, where each transparent plane has its own base and casts striking glimmers, there is another group of glass panes covered by black vinyl drawings. These are also the interiors, the remnants of the drawings that gave life to the metal volutes that, at the beginning of the new century, the artist had designated with one of the hexagrams of the I Ching. This is the Chia Jên series, meaning family or clan, which now, in turn, founds a new family of works. The fragments, transformed and mirrored, create an anthology of forms that, through the black vinyl, cover the glass like pieces of a shadow play.

At first glance, these forms might be perceived as generically Oriental or Chinoiserie; it's no coincidence that for a long time, and for the exoticizing mentality, China was the commonplace of the Orient, reabsorbing different identities. Some of these silhouettes are deliberately zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, and others appear as inert objects like masks, jewels, and emblems, yet animated by a secret life.

However, a broader inquiry leads us to the other side of the Pacific, to the west coast of North America, which was home to societies that erected the carved poles that fascinated Franz Boas when he reflected on "primitive art"; a kind of totemic forms that, curiously and by chance, bear some similarities to those created by Fabiana. And as the world keeps turning and time does not stand still, the artist's objects and designs have entered a closer territory without losing their distant anchors. Now, the glimmers of metal and the obscurities of vinyl have found a renewed existence in cosmopolitan yet intimate Buenos Aires, promising to surprise us, as on other occasions, with the charm of their unusual nature.

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Guillermo Fantoni