Federico Fusj | Extrema Ratio

 

The lines that follow are, for me, a means to reflect on and better observe the recent works of Federico Fusi, a Sienese artist who has made sculpture his primary practice. Reflecting on his sculptural work helps us not only to better understand his poetics, but also to extract elements that allow us to delve into broader forms and ideas around what it means to make sculpture today—a practice he performs with a dancing gait, swift and elegant, driven by a synthesis of classical and future sounds.

 

It is precisely this sonic synthesis, which for me serves as both background and dramatic lifeblood to his subjects, that leads me to believe Federico Fusi has given rise to a new artistic genre: science fiction sculpture.

 

Why science fiction? Because it is the narrative form that best unites imagination and reason, in such a way that imagination becomes real and reason becomes illusory. Science fiction is the only historiography that leads to an understanding of the world—especially the future world. A form of historical and visual nonfiction that too often has been dismissed as “visionary” (which of course is code for “crazy”) in an attempt to point out its oblique and dreamlike dimension—while ignoring its central visual force and its use of form as both a way of thinking and a method of representation. In this sense, the connection to Federico Fusi’s sculpture is realistic. Both open doors that were previously considered closed—or, at best, half-opened in time and never reopened. Behind those doors, we glimpsed a light that we were too fearful to follow, to step into.

 

The light of fantastical storytelling and its religious dimension—not as participatory ritual, but as a formal and formative action aimed at exegesis.

 

Fusi’s sculptures, often carved from marbles typical of the Tuscan land, have a dual function: to interpret and to shape. Both functions arise from a perfect harmony of tradition and future, much like in a (good) science fiction novel. The interpretation of the Biblical text—or better, of a single word extracted from the flow of its composing language (in its network of expressive relationships)—is enacted through a modeling that belongs to the centuries-old practice of interpreting every single passage or word of the sacred text in the attempt to bring new light and understanding. To shape words and give them three-dimensional form is thus a fundamental act of interpretation. Carving and reciting are one and the same practice. The technical and formal result of this attitude belongs more to the nature of a hologram than to that of a plastic object. The work, even if it speaks to us in a traditional—indeed, dialectal—language, appears as a luminous projection in space. We no longer circle around it with our bodies to view all its sides and understand it better; rather, it rotates in the void of a suspended linguistic field—magical and heavy at once. My impression is that it sits there, presenting itself with a dangerous impression of lightness—but once the plug is pulled and the energy holding it aloft vanishes, it crashes to the ground with the weight of stone, perhaps even smashing our foot, and suddenly (and painfully) reminding us of the real nature of words. Let’s be clear—this has nothing to do with the typographic games of visual poetry, but rather with the awe surely felt by those who first interpreted the Qumran biblical Writings, who unrolled the parchment and exposed the characters to the light of day. The one who did so was exposed to the immediate knowledge of its verses as to sunlight itself—not translating the words, but allowing the words to pass into him (and thus into us), evaporating from the scroll and projecting themselves as cinema does onto a screen. This “projecting” is what Fusi’s sculptural practice resembles. It is not only the marble that is shaped by the sculptor—but all of us are modeled by the vision of his work, joining with it as we do with a book.

 

Fusi’s sculptures, roughly the size of a book (or slightly larger), could be handled—if they weren’t so heavy. And this “impression of manageability” remains embedded in the work, making us think—precisely because of their weight—of the strength of the one who dares to lift them, who can easily grasp the words composing the sculpture and play with them like a balloon, spinning them around, giving them new meaning each time. This strongman is someone the sculptor tells us about, but even through Fusi’s own storytelling, we cannot quite understand who he is.

 

Alfredo Pirri, September 2012

 

 

Here I am, 13 years later, writing again about some of Federico Fusi’s works, this time exhibited for his solo show at z2o Sara Zanin Gallery in Rome.

 

The exhibition includes four sculptures: three made from different types of marble, and one acoustic in nature.

 

A distinctive trait—already predominant in his earlier work—of embossing words into marble, remains present in one of the pieces: “Mitzvah (pain in the a**), 2024,” carved from a block of Carrara marble. In the gallery space, atop a floor marked by regular black marble islands, this is the only work placed directly on the ground, without a pedestal to lift it upward. This leads us to imagine it as composed of some material (or entity) so exceptionally heavy that it cannot rise from the earth like the others.

 

Indeed, we are entirely justified in imagining it as a mineral boil, a stone fused with the ground—or more: as something inherently part of it. …Erected upon the rock, the temple opens a World and at the same time returns it to the Earth; and only then is it revealed as native ground... Heidegger writes about the origin of the work of art. This sense of welding with the earth that hosts the Greek temple also belongs to this sculpture. Perhaps, beyond its literal contact with the ground, the perception of its excessive weight emanates from the words carved into the marble: Do not have sexual relations with a woman before marriage. (123 - 355, Deut. 23:18), though not immediately legible in the sculptural composition, they reach us clearly—and far from gently.

 

It may even be that, carried away by the work’s resemblance to a rock outcrop, we picture ourselves with feet dipped in water, feeling unstable and at risk. The union of that sensation with the heavy meaning of the Mitzvah (Hebrew for commandment) carved into the stone makes for something particularly burdensome, intolerable, even scandalous to us.

 

The titles of the other two sculptures are:

 

“Moral Portrait 12, the Name of G-D, 2022–23”, made from Bardiglio Nuvolato marble

“Moral Portrait 13, the Faces of G-D, 2024”, made from onyx

 

Both are elevated by pedestals that are part of the works themselves. Neither has words carved into them.

 

In the first, the configuration is fully rounded, with no front or back—like a cephalopodic, mutating form caught in a moment of constant transformation. Moving around it, one discovers caves and soft architectures—planes that expand and contract with large and small moving outgrowths.

 

In the second, the onyx glows unevenly, as is typical of its crystalline nature. Light slides across its soapy surface, liquefying the material which seems, at times, to melt and then solidify again. This piece seems to have a front and back, like a double page.

 

In these two sculptures, the word is no longer present, but it is still felt—like an echo. It’s not visible because it has dissolved in wind and water, hidden and tucked within the stone’s substance.

 

The fourth sculpture marks the time of the exhibition like a stopwatch, creating a spatial expansion that sets the rhythm of matter’s metamorphosis into image.

 

This is what the exhibition presents to us.

 

What to say?

What to add?

 

These works push my words of thirteen years ago into a new agglomeration of materials densely packed with meaning—just like the words carved by the artist and transformed into formal masses, where the hard and the soft coexist.

 

They seem to originate from, and gain meaning through, the memory of colossal events we’ve lived through: the transformation of great quadrupeds into light-footed bipeds, the alteration of sacred (and thus inexplicable) principles into moral (or moralistic) precepts, and more recently, the conversion of diesel engines to electric ones. Epochal transformations that result in silence—but also a mute state that is our background and our perspective. A mute state not born of surrender, but of transfiguration and labor. A new way to qualify silence—rhythmic, like the tapping of iron chipping stone, or a woodpecker’s beak striking wood—both seeking form and nourishment. Sense and necessity.

 

These are the materials that Federico Fusi’s sculptures are made of.

 

Alfredo Pirri