Fabio Capitanio

From Darkness to the Colours of Abstraction, Passing Through the Baroque: Here Is the Art of Fabio Capitanio

Fabio Capitanio's artistic drive made its way through difficult life circumstances and little time at his disposal, but in the end it prevailed. Canvases painted with vibrant enamels and marble sculptures are now the centre of the artist's life, after a long period of work in his father's company.

"I practise every day and look for new solutions," Capitanio says. "Lately I have been working on a series of 'luminous' works, applying enamels to glass or Plexiglas and achieving, in this way, effects similar to those of the stained-glass windows of Gothic churches."

Fabio Capitanio adores the Baroque, and his next goal is to create, within interior spaces, a blend of this ancient style and his contemporary abstract touch. "I am madly in love with Rome and Caravaggio," the artist adds.

Due to the closures caused by the pandemic, Capitanio has more time for his art and has begun to concentrate on sculpture. "I started with Botticino marble, typical of the Brescia area, where I was born and live," he recounts. "But it is a very hard and difficult material to work with, although the results are interesting; now I have moved on to Carrara marble, which is more malleable."

Fabio Capitanio's sculptures are small in size; working with larger marble blocks would require the use of machinery he does not currently own. The artist proceeds with a not overly detailed drawing ("I have never had the patience to draw," he says), yet the result has a surprising truthfulness and power.

Fabio learned patience and a love for manual work in the 1990s, during a particularly difficult period of his life, when he had to begin a seven-year process of withdrawal from medication. To free himself from the dependence, at the age of twenty-seven, Capitanio entered a rehabilitation community. The artist explains: "They used a method that put you in contact with reality. I learned to know myself and to relate to others. We often spoke about ourselves in a group, and we spoke without taking offence at the comments of others, a way of interacting that, unfortunately, I never found again once I left the community. Besides this, I learned to do a great many manual jobs, including some that were not within my expertise. Among those I loved were cabinetmaking and wood marquetry."

Fabio Capitanio's passion and patience for woodworking led him to painting. "After seven years in the community, I left and resumed work as a surveyor at my father's company. But I felt that it was not my path; moreover, I missed the contact with those manual crafts I had learned during my recovery."

Thus, during his convalescence from an illness, in 2009, Fabio picked up a box of tempera paints belonging to his sister's children and began painting for the first time. From that moment on, Capitanio experimented with various techniques until he fell in love with enamels: "I discovered how enamels react with one another, and I began to fuse the different colours with different components. Enamels are vibrant and luminous," the artist explains.

After his experience in the rehabilitation community, Fabio Capitanio found himself in a very different world. He says: "All the values of life I had learned clashed with the real world. This made me reflect; in a moment of negativity I became introverted and accumulated various tensions, which found an outlet through painting."

It is no coincidence that his first cycle of paintings is entitled "Strange Visions" and comprises canvases in dark tones. Then came the second series, "Ariosi", with brighter colours and an atmosphere of optimism, followed by the cycle "Realtà virtuali" and so on. Capitanio explains: "These are momentary and unrepeatable inspirations. If I had to reproduce the cycles I have already painted, I would not be able to."

Fabio Capitanio began exhibiting in 2011, in a group show in Piacenza, where he was noticed by an art critic. The world of exhibitions, which has at times disappointed him ("I was supposed to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, but then everything fell through because of a controversy," he recounts), does not excite him. In 2017, instead, he founded the Cromomorfismo movement, an artistic manifesto based on a kind of process art, in which action combines with the movement of colour.