Lucio Fanti

Lucio Fanti’s painting exists within the scope of a more open practice of art, which embraces for instance sculpture, drawing, installation and stage design. Since the seventies, he has developed an artistic vocabulary in which form and the organisation of space and lighting go hand in hand with narration. While his first paintings saw him making an affectionate and ironic use of Soviet iconography, his more recent pictures construct landscapes of the minuscule. These paintings could at first be perceived as hyper-realistic renditions, if they did not gradually reveal themselves to be points of passage. As it happens, the whole world can be found in a single grape – landscapes and entire populations embedded in the surfaces and depths of the painting. Lucio Fanti espouses the idea of an amused experience of art, of a free praxis that may consist in making “grand paintings with minuscule subjects”. His work is an open playground where a particular poetics of the world grapples with the simple pleasure of the craft.