The White Noise Gallery’s 2016 inaugural exhibition opens on Saturday January 23 featuring a solo show by the Sardinian artist, Roberto Fanari, entitled IRON. Roberto, who won the White Noise Special Award at the INSIDEART 2014 Talent Price, will show a series of his past works as well as a new project created specifically for the Gallery’s Project Room.

The exhibition takes its name from the material which dominates Roberto’s work: iron, a perfect metaphor for the framework of contemporary civilization. Using a thick mesh of welded iron reinforcing rods, Roberto creates sculptures which seem heavy because of the material adopted, but are at the same time light in form; an ideal encounter between the seating collections created by Harry Bertoia and the works of Duane Hanson.

Roberto’s research results in the perfect actualization of a plastic art form in the age of the digital image; his iron grids trace forms in space reminiscent of the a polygon mesh in computer graphics.

Fanari’s sculpture is a reflection on the completeness of the unfinished.
His works of art originate from an illumination Roberto had while studying at the Academy; for Roberto the skeletal structures serving as the soul of the sculpture are completed works of art in themselves. Using iron reinforcing rods, he traces the essential form of the figure to create a sculpture composed of alternating perfectly detailed areas and empty volumes, as observed in the grotesque masks of Adolfo Wildt.

What strikes the imagination most are the subjects represented by Fanari: figures of children, hunting trophies, Victorian furnishings. On the boundary between the familiar and the unsettling, they provoke contrasting feelings creating a surreal atmosphere dominated by the absurd sensation of standing in front of a sculpture of a sculpture.

PROJECT ROOM
Roberto’s new work is the result of an encounter between sculpture and large scale drawings. Here the hardness of the metal contrasts with the fragility of the paper, while the iron reinforcing rods contrast with the graphite lines, the two-dimensional equivalent of the rods. The drawings are framed by architectural structures projected by the artist, these structures work as artificial pilaster strips helping to give rhythm to the space around. The synthetic resin sculptures transmit solidity and hardness but they still fragiles and thins.