Vitality of Matter

... In the monograph catalogue prepared at the end of 1994, Pino Dato pointed to her "...material colours, now blurred, now sharp, which make you think again about the incongruities of being", inviting us not to look "in Anna Fabris's paintings for pessimism or optimism, those idle categories of thought... Look for life, for matter, and its mysterious, fascinating becoming".
... Anna has never stopped developing her work, taking an interest in new techniques and materials, in the communication of making, and in the visibility and critical awareness of her own research, reaffirming 'matter' as a privileged field of inquiry and discovery: at first more as the harmonic settling of a rhythm with particular, mysterious suggestions, rich in echoes, in 'figures' and in unexpected, unknown modulations in space – typical of a certain lyrical abstraction – rather than as the manifestation of qualities intrinsic to Informal art. Delving into the psychic space of the Informal, and 'decoration' (in the sense of an added, enhancing emotional value), occupied Anna Fabris's attention for years, prompted by a natural, instinctive preference for the gesture that manipulates matter, for an expressive manual skill that is never casual but ever more cultivated – not through tools (pencils, brushes, spatulas, pastes of colour) but by working directly with the hands on different materials put to reinvented uses, transforming their 'sense' while at the same time being subject to their capacity to inform the senses, able to prompt outward knowledge and perceptions from the depths, activating deposits of visual memory linked to tactility, and to manual explication and explicitation. By the 'vitality' of matter Anna means precisely its capacity, in its rhythmic redistribution in space, to bring to the surface knots and nuclei of deep experience, to release stratifications, to dissolve encrustations and labyrinths, in a making that becomes listening to oneself, penetrating one's own breath as a rediscovery, an adjustment and a harmonisation with the rhythm of life and, at the same time, a liberating and therapeutic event that allows one to handle, model and smooth the scattered, painful 'lumps' of one's own experience. A true 'translation' that gives the innermost self tactility and visibility, an emergence that prevents the abscesses of suffering and unease hidden in the folds of consciousness, in the abysses of the subconscious, from staying submerged, festering and becoming deadly. The titles of her works are significant, even if you have to insist to obtain them. "I prefer to put 'untitled', because in the end they are all the manifestation of the same existential problem: making contact with anxieties, pains, 'unresolved knots', clots in the arteries". In my view they have the charm of expressive essentiality, which raises the work to a discovery well above subjective emotion and the sentimental diary, yet they declare for everyone the possibility of perceptions from within surfacing through the meshes and geometries of the flow of life, which become elastic to attention, to vigilant thought, to evaluating consciousness, allowing one or more knots to emerge and be communicated. Nevertheless, their truest meaning lies not in the result, in the finished work, but in the long, meditated process in which the artist (and behind her the viewer) selects, weighs, remembers, manipulates, pulls the hemp threads and loosens them, recalling experiences and reacting to them in terms of life/death, passion/anger, red/black, black/white, blue/gold, flow/suspension, flat and raised.
The three-dimensionality, and in many cases the spatial continuity in different or multiple directions, confirm that Anna Fabris moves within the realm of psychic energy, creating fields of 'breathing' of matter in time (flow) and in space (the swelling of the lumps, the stretching, widening or moiré of the hemp coloured with acrylic), always between the two bands of past and future that contain the present.
... Since 1997 Anna Fabris has also been deeply absorbed, first by the experience of Raku-fired ceramics and then by the magic of colours imprisoned and heightened by glass-fusing processes, giving proof of her passion for discovering the manipulative, constructive and expressive qualities of the most diverse materials and techniques, truly convinced that it is above all from such exercise that the senses learn, shaping and 'informing' the intelligence with the real and promoting the original, creative and 're-creative' capacity of artistic intervention. The 'measure' and discretion with which she acts with and on materials are the outcome of an effective planning and rhythmic intention, so that the path of emotional and psychological clarification becomes an aesthetic itinerary – of relaxed and heightened sensitivity – but also an ethical one, of research and of identifying sense as meaning, existential direction and the aspiration to a harmonic state between the inner and the visible.

Padua, February 1999
Giorgio Segato