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metaphorically universal. The collective drama is Fantoni’s own vases aspired, thus, to become
transfused with an intimate air, safe from the rhetorical sculptures, reviving more than before the formal logic
snares of the theme, and it is memory that determines that establishes the functional basis for their utility.
the sculpture’s formation and elaboration where the These are vases which do not adapt themselves, in
human figure is alone, immersed in its own suffering. substance, to being furnishings, and they define one of
They are the tired soldiers of every war, they are the fall the most fertile formal repertoires created by
bodies of warriors amputated in body and spirit, their contemporary ceramics. The infinite variety of models
expressive efficacy is stylistically amplified by the first and ornamental motifs, with elegant divertissement
steps toward abstraction.The iconic data is maintained, effects, reveal a Fantoni who gladly explores a territory
not as a concrete countenance, but as a value: but the inundated by multicolour tonalities, by vibrant
forms begin to flake away, the corporality becomes luminosity, by fluctuating essences.
synthesized in fleeting volumes, the primitive, serene In a purely sculptural realm, the schematisation,
reference to the human body is dissolved. The through a linearism that disperses and dismembers the
polychrome colours sustain the process of abstraction, figure in space, is the basis for the compositions
exalting the body’s interior tremors, excavating a space representing the satyrs, shepherds, musicians, warriors:
for itself between the incisions and the hollows of the great sculptures which assume formally, through the
epidermal layers. incisive modelling, a neocubist characteristic that seems
They are the sculptures of memory, that had to hear the echoes of Leoncillo’s “New Front for the
remained trapped in his hands for years, and that found Arts” (nevertheless, without any implicit declaration of
during the course of the Fifties, far from the distress of political ideology ), realized in many versions, from the
the moment, their formal genesis. These works are end of the sixth decade to the beginning of the
often ignored by Fantoni’s art critics both because they following one.
are lost among the great number of compositions It is a new research, which does not take on the
coming out of his workshop, and because they tone of an achievement painstakingly gained, as it was
decidedly separate themselves from the celebrative and so for Leoncillo; it is here again a allusive
lively intertwining of colour and form that usually representationalism, a manifestation of an
characterizes his production. anthropomorphic subjective symbolism, that reveals
And so from here, Fantoni makes the move to a itself, in the end, as a serene aesthetic choice, crossed
substantial renewal: a progressive stylisation of the form perhaps by the thin vein of uneasiness, but immune to
invests his sculptural syntax, in a process, as we may the melancholy and tormenting meditation of
remember,that places itself chronologically in a context untouched lost beauty.
that is open to the European debate on geometric At the beginning of the Seventies, Fantoni again
abstraction and that will open itself to, in the course of find himself before another radical change, pushing
the sixth decade, the lyrical dawning of the Informal himself to the limits experimenting with the dynamic
season. In this case also, Fantoni pays a price for his processes of abstraction, an ultimate consequence of the
consistency,self-imposing a renewed expressive formula stylistic changes that he has previously gone through. A
that perhaps is a consequence of the his previous years’ reconsidering of the value of pure form gradually takes
formal workings, but that also take into account the over the process of paring down the figure,
artistic currents that pervaded that Italian and transforming it into a visual game by now entirely
international art worlds. Certain stylistic elements from abstract. It is a process that turns the planning of the art
his early productions resurface, but the material is object upside-down; there where the plan was, the
modelled with a more sinuous, stylised sense of predetermined schemes in the mind through which
elegance; this holds true for both the simple vases as one finds the most appropriate expressive routes, is now
well as articulated sculptural compositions. Indeed, it is a revealed form: almost without premeditation, it is a
precisely in this twenty year period that the potter and sudden force gathered in the act of modelling the
the sculptor are sublimated in an integral osmotic material. This is the case with the White Ceramics,as
process: the figures are stylised by pure markings that also is the case with the large group of composition-
crowd the surfaces of the vases, bowls, plaques, and projects for giant sculptures which followed afterwards,
basins; they seem to be rendered by swift gestures, characterized by the alternating highs and lows of the
clearing a space in the tangle of colour, ever more surface, where the hollows follow one another, creating
dense, forming a thick and wrinkled crust, similar to deep shadows, taking refuge in the meandering
the results which, in informal circles, anticipated, unconscious and intuitive paths, to then, finally, to be
contemporarily, the materialist and markings painters, extinguished in a vague bath of light. Sculptures
from Dubuffet to Burri, whose textural colour, freely strewn, on the surface, with primordial plastic markings
applied to the canvas and sometimes amalgamated with that call to mind the traces produced by natural
other materials, obtained, effectively, an almost processes and by the passing of time: perforations,
sculptural effect . imprints, wrinkled planes, scratchings, are indices of a

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