FABIO INVERNI

Fabio Inverni, the sensitive artist that replicates and wraps paper boxes the Masters. A way to tell, and exorcise, the caducity of art and of the mandkind.

For Fabio Inverni, an Italian painter born in Tuscany in 1968, art is a classic and noble subject to deal with. For him, being an artist means making something concrete, something beautiful that embodies tastefulness and flair.

Strongly sceptical about the use of technologies in art, Fabio Inverni gained fame and success thanks to his reinterpretations of classic portrays like “The Girl with the pearl earring”, “The Lady with an ermine” or “Sick Bacchus” where famous and historic subjects, perfectly copied after the original ones, are wrapped up in hyper-realistic painted paper boxes.

Wrapping a Masterpiece with paper boxes, sometimes completely covering the subject underneath, appears as a metaphorical way to preserve and protect our artistic heritage from the art system’s crises and disruption.

The past plays a main role in Fabio Inverni’s art and personal life according to its bound with the happiness of childhood’s memories, seen as the only gateway from life’s uncertainty. The badly treated paper boxes, that the artist paints in an awesome realistic way, are nothing but the portray of human frailty.

Many critics compare Inverni to the Italian poet Pascoli, with whom he shares the dramatic experience of the father’s premature loss. Inverni’s father, a painter and an art teacher, wasn’t only a mentor but the one who firstly showed him the enchanting world of art.

In his first still-lives, a series of paintings figuring his childhood places and memories in a dusk and melancholic light, the artist used to convey his sorrow into art, like in a secret diary, in order to bring back to life his happy childhood days.

After those first introspective experiences, Fabio Inverni moved to USA where he gained a huge success and where is still considered one of the greatest living artists. When he came back to his beloved Poggio Caiano, an idyllic village near Florence surrounded by golden hills, his art radically changed. The artist decided to raise his personal experience, and pain, to a more universal stage and he begun to address his paintings, and his message, to all mankind.

In the last series, his childhood’s memories and glimpses have been replaced by classic masterpieces wrapped with (or hidden by) paper boxes. Those paintings encourage his public to look for the old and classic values that have always inspired the greatest artists: beauty and flair.

Wrapping, and hiding, the master’s portrays, like Christo used to do in his exceptional performances, is the only way to make people become aware of their value, their uncertainty and precariousness. According to Fabio Inverni’s perspective, digital art debases both the artist and his public.

No one can say for sure that this Italian artist doesn’t love painting. In Fabio Inverni’s artworks everything is painted by the artist itself, even if he could easily stamp the original portrays and work on in. The tape of the paper boxes is accurately painted as the paper box’s pieces that manage to tell the details of their shipping: the sun exposure, the beating rain or the delivery people’s rough staff.

Maybe online-shopping addicts are used to mistreated boxes but, in the artist’s scenario, those boxes represent the mankind, hit, hurt and wrecked by the action of life. Mankind is portrayed like an abused Amazon parcel.

As a result of all this, art embodies a saving and healing role for society, a third dimension where cheerful memories, personal achievements and wins are turned into something beautiful and made with love. Of course, perfectly wrapped up hereafter.