Fabio Petani

Fabio Petani was born in summer 1987 in Pinerolo. After having obtained the scientific high school degree, he receives an M.A. in Cultural Heritage (Faculty of Humanities) from the University of Turin, with an M.A. thesis on Urban Art and the street culture from the origins to this day. This kind of investigation brings him closer to the art scene of Turin. Soon he begins to collaborate with the activities promoted by the Street Art Tourino, which aim at bringing out the backstage to the city’s most important walls and their particular features. Shortly after he becomes part, together with the artists
Corn79, MrFijodor, Etnik and the photographer Livio Ninni, of the cultural association Il Cerchio E Le Gocce (particularly active within the art scene not only of Turin since 2001). Fabio Petani counts a large number of artistic partnerships within the Turin area and in 2014 he joins the team of StreetAlps, an important urban art festival that takes shape in the valleys around Pinerolo. Since 2015 he is also a member of the group Murarte Torino. His works are characterized by a disarranged harmony of lines, shapes and volumes, which complement each other through the use of faint and harmonious colors, blended into breaking elements. His research analyzes the chemical and molecular aspects of objects giving rise to a lengthy operation of reconstruction of the elements in the periodic table. An increasingly detailed production that brings out an ever-changing organic complexity. Each chemical element, just like each plant, is somehow connected to the environment, the space or the context in which the wall is
made. Both, chemical element and plant, are peculiar to decadence and dereliction. But nature, intruding upon buildings in disuse, regains its own space and gives rise to an harmonious contrast between the building’s death and the rebirth of life. By the same token, his works, and particularly the walls, represent the llife-death dualism, being modeled on the places’ story and getting harmoniously mixed up with the decadent and forgotten industrial architectures. As a matter of fact, all his interventions are made in order to let the work becoming part of the transformation process of the wall itself.
The importance of the connection between work and context is evoked also by his works on wood, paper and other alternative materials. It is through the employment of such materials that Fabio Petani tries to get carried away by the matter, aiming at ending the periodic table with a cluster of artworks able to tell a story about the alchemy between art, chemistry and nature. “The ability to create while maintaining the Being’s two parts, the visible and the invisible, reality and fantasy and all those primogenital dualisms, leads to a continuous personal evolution. When I hear the word alchemy I automatically think about a wonder. A strange thing that is fascinating and
underestimated at the same time, probably because it is not comprehended. I believe that by giving up prejudices and others’ way of thinking one can see beyond, in order to get truly in touch with the world and look at the system from the outside.”

Text by – Flavia De Marco –