Trees. Lonely cypresses in absorbed landscapes, exclamation marks in a universe of fallow land. White birches challenging stormy skies and golden poplars bent by the fury of the north wind. Proud and neatly arranged rows of vines and foliage ruffled by the south-east wind. Trees. The trees of Fabio Grassi - that entertain an on-going dialogue, quarrel, relationship and challenge but also a gentle conversation with the sky - can be regarded as symbols of the problems that worry all those who love nature. Symbols of a living world - represented by the foliage, trunks, branches and leaves of the trees themselves - and image of a lifeless world formed by the sky, which in the paintings of Fabio Grassi, almost always seems to be aware of the impending degradation. Yet, hope is obviously still alive. It survives in the bright views of golden rural landscapes where secluded and neat country houses reflect an harmonious relation between man and earth; it survives in the images of tidy and geometrically arranged cultivated land dominated by the proud figure of a tree and again in the foggy horizons where series of pale blue hills seem to follw each other. The message that Fabio Grassi wants to convey through his works is a message of peace, of reconciliation with nature and trees. The trees he so keenly paints are not real ones, they represent living beings: men, women, lovers, old friends. Each of them can tell a story, sometimes a melancholy one, sometimes a positive one. His motionless characters stand lost in the countryside, wrapped in a sky which is the leading feature, with its windy ways, its shifting clouds, the colour of its many dawns and sunsets, a door to an endless variety of shades. And it is nice to be inside his fascinating world where little events are keenly tended - where you can feel as if you were with an old friend silently listening to you. |
