Fabio Roncato: Il pianeta dove evaporano le rocce

On Fabio Roncato’s solo show The Planet Where Rocks Evaporate

«Close these remains in their tombs. Gutai art doesn’t change materials, it brings them to life. Gutai art doesn’t counterfeit materials. In Gutai art, the human spirit and materials mingle with one another even if they are opposites. The materials are not absorbed by the spirit. The spirit doesn’t force the materials to a submission. If one leaves the materials as they are, presenting them as such, they are able to communicate us something. Keeping the materials alive means keeping the spirit alive, and raising the spirit means bringing the materials at the same height of the spirit.»
This is what Jiro Yoshiara wrote in Osaka in 1954, the year in which the Manifesto of Japanese art group Gutai was written.

Fabio Roncato has a very similar approach about the freedom and independence that the material inevitably holds within itself, despite the manipulation and the re-direction towards a precise formal composition that it is given later. That of Roncato is an urgency that the artist himself cares about considering as such, and which reveals itself through the selection of materials that quickly satisfy the implementation of an interaction process.

Fabio Roncato, Torre delle Grazie, Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa

Fabio Roncato, Momentum, installation view, 2017/2018; Il pianeta dove evaporano le rocce, Torre delle Grazie, Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa

The awareness of a control that’s missing, of the impossibility of a total spiritual enforcement, also led Roncato’s work to be perceived and read in a cross-sectional manner by different “audiences” that he personally confronts during his artistic residencies abroad. The perception of the artist’s work is inevitably capable of adapting to different cultures, disregarding the extent to which the work is actually tied to a moment of specific reflection developed in a set time, and – especially – a precise place. The perceptional process entails the involvement of the mnemonic one for which the artistic object, despite its being created for it to have its own independence, is inevitably swept over by thoughts and read though personal memories: an “appropriation” of the artistic image that could, initially, reveal the impossibility of an unequivocal reading of the artwork.

Fabio Roncato, Momentum, aluminium, 2017/2018; Il pianeta dove evaporano le rocce, Torre delle Grazie, Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa

Fabio Roncato, Momentum, beeswax, 2017/2018; Il pianeta dove evaporano le rocce, Torre delle Grazie, Musei Civici di Bassano del Grappa

In The Ghost in the Machine, Arthur Koestler talks about “perceptional filters” that have the task of abstracting the enormous amount of information overwhelming the individual. There is a definitive and inevitable tendency to rely on sensorial perception, which gives the opportunity to re-gain an order inside. One can re-build an interpretation that goes back to having its own independence, and to being read according to a common, universal ground.

Roncato’s reflection is then articulated by following a production of small sculptural systems, in which two matters usually react to each other according to a natural tension brought on by their chemical composition and the physical responses that they give to one another. The formal conclusion of many of the works visually enhances this process, and implies an analytical approach from artist towards the material that is, intentionally, merely impositional.