Critical texts, Germany, Frankfurt am Main, 11 October 2010
Fabrizio Sanna is an Italian producer, DJ and artist. But music, art, pop, painting and life itself are all indistinguishable for Fabrizio Sanna because his artistic work is intimately linked to this thoroughly musical biography. When we take a look at Fabrizio Sanna’s material collages, we hear music. That doesn’t necessarily mean the electronic music that Sanna produces these days, but the raw and uneven music that fascinated Sanna in the early nineties. We see it on one of his photomontages: Dee Dee Ramone, Sid Vicious and images of legendary punk rockers that Sanna has pasted up and painted over in gaudy colours. And on top of all that, Sanna has formed a base corpus out of cable and drawn up four base sides - that puts the finishing touches on his ferocious homage to his own youth. Sanna was and is a musician and punk and its retroreverberations in Grunge from Seattle where the first thing that made a distinct impression on him. Sex Pistols, Ramones or Green Day as well as the spirit of punk, the love of the raw, of the incomplete, of do-it-yourself is something that you also find in his images. But there's also the anti-academic, the desire to simply take off with a couple of chords or some heavy and really grungy swipes of the brush. Just slap it on, spraying on the canvas and create again and again with renewed lust!
It is not only the musicians and bands who are important to Fabrizio Sanna that appear as symbols in his art. There are other things you can find there such as an airplane ticket that reminds you of Cuba, train wagons or little toy cars; then there are manipulated photographs that show places from his Sardinian home that Sanna has been to and that he associates something with. It is self-evident that art is a risk, especially when it is young and there’s no safety net. It is the luck of the self-educated that they don't have to worry as much about state-of-the-art, trends and fashions. This is why Fabrizio Sanna’s material collages appear so timeless – even though we can see from the visual elements that they come from the here and now.
Sanna reminisces: “We took every opportunity we could get our hands on to grab the bass guitar and express the thoughts and the light-heartedness of our youth”. Light-heartedness is also one of the foremost words in his art. He frequently glues playing cards, Italian cards also used for Tarot onto his pictures that have great symbolic force. He says that they remind him of his youth in Sardinia. Playing cards point to the world of games which is a secretive and delightful world. The homo ludens, playing man, seen from a philosophical point of view, is someone who develops his or her skills by playing and thus places himself in opposition to the world of the functional. The German poet, Friedrich Schiller, said that people are “only totally human when they at play”. In the later 60s, the sociologist Herbert Marcuse described the concept of the game as contemplation in order to create the latitude you need for individual development.
This is how I would like to interpret the work of Fabrizio Sanna: as a playful and artistic means of inventing new refuges, as human behaviour according to rules you choose yourself. But it is not only playing cards, dominoes and objects from the world of music such as vinyl records, electronic components or even elements of record players that constantly appear in his small- to medium-format pictures integrated into his emerging works of art. Sometimes they're little figures of policeman embodying a wholly different world diametrically opposed to the world of games.
Let’s contemplate these images with enjoyment as a playing field where energy and power is released. A playing field where not only the things used to create art, the colours and shapes, but also the systems and life conceptions struggle with one another.
Marc Peschke, art historian and cultural journalist
www.marcpeschke.de
It is not only the musicians and bands who are important to Fabrizio Sanna that appear as symbols in his art. There are other things you can find there such as an airplane ticket that reminds you of Cuba, train wagons or little toy cars; then there are manipulated photographs that show places from his Sardinian home that Sanna has been to and that he associates something with. It is self-evident that art is a risk, especially when it is young and there’s no safety net. It is the luck of the self-educated that they don't have to worry as much about state-of-the-art, trends and fashions. This is why Fabrizio Sanna’s material collages appear so timeless – even though we can see from the visual elements that they come from the here and now.
Sanna reminisces: “We took every opportunity we could get our hands on to grab the bass guitar and express the thoughts and the light-heartedness of our youth”. Light-heartedness is also one of the foremost words in his art. He frequently glues playing cards, Italian cards also used for Tarot onto his pictures that have great symbolic force. He says that they remind him of his youth in Sardinia. Playing cards point to the world of games which is a secretive and delightful world. The homo ludens, playing man, seen from a philosophical point of view, is someone who develops his or her skills by playing and thus places himself in opposition to the world of the functional. The German poet, Friedrich Schiller, said that people are “only totally human when they at play”. In the later 60s, the sociologist Herbert Marcuse described the concept of the game as contemplation in order to create the latitude you need for individual development.
This is how I would like to interpret the work of Fabrizio Sanna: as a playful and artistic means of inventing new refuges, as human behaviour according to rules you choose yourself. But it is not only playing cards, dominoes and objects from the world of music such as vinyl records, electronic components or even elements of record players that constantly appear in his small- to medium-format pictures integrated into his emerging works of art. Sometimes they're little figures of policeman embodying a wholly different world diametrically opposed to the world of games.
Let’s contemplate these images with enjoyment as a playing field where energy and power is released. A playing field where not only the things used to create art, the colours and shapes, but also the systems and life conceptions struggle with one another.
Marc Peschke, art historian and cultural journalist
www.marcpeschke.de
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