artistic vision

Fantini embraces assemblage as his primary mode of expression, drawn to its capacity for ongoing experimentation. This approach allows him to work freely with form and material, constantly testing, reconfiguring, and overturning his initial ideas. Each work begins with a phase of conception—an image or intuition translated into materials and color—only to evolve organically as the process unfolds, guided by gesture, accident, and the physical presence of the materials themselves. The result is a visual language shaped by unexpected encounters and surprising compositions.

 

The materials Fantini selects are intentionally ordinary. Cardboard, gauze, tape, and plastic bags speak the language of contemporary industrial culture, while fragments of notes, sketches, agendas, and personal ephemera carry traces of the artist’s everyday life. Brought into dialogue, layered and reworked, these elements form dense material surfaces that operate as an autonomous expressive vocabulary. Their textures leave spontaneous marks—resonant yet never fixed—while their superimpositions create multiple planes of meaning. This sense of layering extends into three dimensions through thin or crumpled papers that catch light and shadow, generating subtle volumes, voids, and densities. The use of gauze and adhesives introduces a semi-transparency that shifts with the light, allowing the work to unfold gradually over time.

 

The recurring vertical bands that appear in Fantini’s works suggest a spatial and temporal rhythm—an abstract framework that hints at narrative without depicting it. The physicality of tearing and rupture, coupled with the intimate traces of personal materials, evokes emotional terrains that the viewer is invited to traverse and interpret freely.

 

What began as an effort to exorcise both personal and collective anxieties of contemporary life has gradually evolved into a desire to transform the artwork into a space of participation and shared experience. The viewer is no longer positioned as a passive observer but as an active presence within the work. This impulse—central to Fantini’s practice for over fifteen years—anchors his artistic research today, opening it outward into a communal process.

Rooted in the experimental legacy of the historical avant-gardes and resonating with the material sensibilities of the Informal, Fantini’s work finds its closest articulation in the notion of the Open Work. His assemblages shift from being static objects to becoming fields of possibility—places where meaning is not given, but formed in the encounter.

 

“If art can choose as many subjects as it wishes, the only content that truly matters is the way in which the human being relates to the world and resolves this attitude in form.”
— Umberto Eco

Text by Claudia Gerardi