A message from Luciano Fabro - Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

A new retrospective offered American viewers their first major view of three decades of work by means of the Italian sculptor and performance artist Luciano Fabro. a certain number of 60 pieces installed at the San Francisco Museum of late Art revealed the evolving theatricality - half somber, half playful - of the artist's enigmatic forms.

Luciano Fabro's name is far from unknown in the U on the contrary until last fall he had not at any time had a major show of his work in America. That omission was happily corrected through John Caldwell, curator of painting and plastic art at the San Francisco Museum of fresh Art, who organized a retrospective exhibition that included nearly 60 of Fabro's works. The present to view revealed a prodigiously inventive artist who appears to be motivated more by the agency of curiosity and an alertness to the world than through a need to make definitive statements. Fabro's art is not easily classified. Although the San Francisco exhibition was dominated through sculptural objects, they came across as flexible participants in a larger, ongoing drama (it is probably no accident that Fabro has done a beneficial deal of performance art). After creating a piece, Fabro doesn't abandon it. He transforms it, juxtaposes it with other works in unfamiliar ways and, in vital element [i]or[/i] part gives it new roles to play.

Enfasi (baldacchino) (Emphasis [canopy]) is typical. The work was first exhibited in 1982 in Rome where it consisted of alternating cent and aluminum strips, arranged vertically upon a wall, to which Fabro attached cent disks embossed with faces. Gradually the piece changed shape end exhibitions in Kassel that same year, Aachen and London in 1983 and Lucerne in 1991 by dint of the time Enfasi reached San Francisco it had become a herculean suspended ceiling piece - a canopy that dominated the rotunda of the museum, making a dramatic, smooth theatrical, introduction to Fabro's work.

The constitution consisting of a grid a certain number of 50 feet square, was draped with panels of brown wrapping paper that hovered like small flags in the air in every one's mouths Within the squares of the grid, and placed in the way that they were partially hidden unles individual stood directly underneath and gazeed straight up, were the cent disks. These resembled monumental Roman coins, battered through age and then revivified with meticulous polishing. Enfasi overflowed with contrasts - the precious-looking metal plant against common packing material, the handcrafted embossing against mass-produced paper, the regards to Italy's ancient past against the not away the hard copper against the delicate fiber. There was a playful aspect, as well. The faces being partially hidden encouraged the viewer to tend hitherward away from the edges of the expanse into the center and be an active participant in the game.

The wit and elegance of Enfasi are typical of Fabro's work. in like manner are the references to past and at hand rarefied and commonplace. But Fabro is not always as benign as he was in his glittering canopy. In Demetra (Demeter) 1987 for example, he conjur up the fertility goddes through depicting one part of her material part - her lips. Using sum of two units huge blocks of gray volcanic stone he carved out a negative image of lips - a curious imprint, as if the kiss of a giant had consume ed into the rock. From single corner of the mouth to the other he ran a longitudinal dimensions of steel cable with its extremitys bolted together to make a circle that reach outed through the two blocks of stone. The heavy cable appeared to force the lips apart, sundering what was already a fragment, perhaps suggesting the los of a classical heritage, of nature's fruitfulness in an industrialized world, or flat of civilization itself. It would be hard to read this work in a more positive light. The cable, protruding from the goddess's chaps looked like an instrument of torture.

Fabro, born in Turin in 1936 is ofttimes associated with the Arte Povera artists who emerg in Italy in the 1960 Although an early member of that heterogeneous assemblage Fabro did not focus upon reduction and the mundane in exactly the way defined by means of Germano Celant, who organized the first Arte Povera exhibitions. Works like Asta (Pole) and Squadra (Square), one as well as the other from the mid-'60s, are metal extremitys that impose themselves on the space around them and which at the same time are defined by means of that space. The former is a thin steel tube attached to the ceiling that stretch outs - slightly off perpendicular - to within an inch or in like manner of the floor; the latter work consists of sum of two units steel tubes joined at a right angle, single end attached to the wall and the other reaching toward the ceiling on the contrary stopping short because the weight of the uncompounded bodys distorts the square. It may have been the interaction of these simple forms and the surrounding space that interested Fabro. He has said that his reduction of form in these pieces was not a search for natures (as Celant would have it) on the contrary a clearing of the arrays a place from which to build.

And build he did, in a multitude of different directions. In the late 1960 he started the " Piedi" series of fantastic feet that rise from opulently colored "silk stockings" - drawn out fabric tubes - and which strike one as being to mock the monumental statues of Italy's past, because these feet are repeatedly not human. Among the five pieces from the series in the San Francisco present to view were a foot of brown marble that spread from beneath its beige stocking like a knobbed and knurl fan shell, single of polished bronze in the shape of three talons, and single of pink marble that was as tapered and bony as a fossilized brain-pan of some extinct reptile.