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refined, regenerated and epidermic sensitivity, which is
attentive to nature and its metamorphoses.
An exceptional page, one of the highest qualitative
objectives attained by Italian ceramics. A vocation that,
in Fantoni, will not rest: with theses first foot holds, he
takes off on an abstract expressionistic exercise that will
accompany him up to the present, resulting each time
in diversified solutions.
In this most recent season, still fully productive,
Fantoni gratifies his ecstatic emotionality by freeing it
to explore surreal worlds, giving into an impulsiveness
of a free and uncontrolled pictorial activity. A poetic
endeavour, courteously ironic, freed from any
descriptive task,that allows the indistinct overlapping of
forms and pure colours into the entire fabric of his
work. It is a dreamy sensibility that we breath in
through the refractory plaques of the Nineties, where
arise the plotted vortex of celestial constellations, the
solar eclipses and explosions, the astral movements, the
spatial phenomena. Here, patterns of granular colour
are determined by a dripping effect in serpentine,
tortuous, extemporaneous paths; they lose themselves
in a free constellation of flowing lava, never before so
sumptuous, with which Fantoni seems to want to fill
the surface’s every lacuna.
A creative irrationalism that finds expression
through the modeling of small sculptures – born
initially from the idea of assemblages of workshop
leftovers – like the Meteors and The desert Roses, created
in these recent years in various forms and chromatic
modulations. One could say, given these creations, that
Fantoni knows no manual effort: because he has in
himself that sense of the form, of the value of the
material in its infinite potentiality of aesthetic
adaptability and plastic fluidity, that can elevate any
element that awakens his attentions to the stature of an
emotional and musical score.
It occurs to us to think that in no other way could
Marcello Fantoni have conducted his research in the
ceramic medium, remaining faithful to that ingrained
vocation of art that continues to develop.A course that
we have seen rise out of a serene ancient harmony,
foundations originating from the solid Tuscan and
Etruscan artistic traditions; a physical happiness little by
little broken by the remembrances of the war and then
by the advancing of the post-war neoavant-garde. A
disintegration, however, that never leaves ruins behind
itself. Fantoni’s work, even where it expresses human
pain and suffering, nevertheless, tends toward a
lyricism, a musical tension that gives to us today one of
the more sensitive and vital interpreters of the art of
our time.

Elisa Gradi

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