"The striped curtain" Painting

Gianni Fabbri was born in Florence in 1955. After the High School (Liceo Scientifico), he attended the Art Institute of Florence, and in that stimulating atmosphere he started to cultivate his interest in art, and enrolled at the Faculty of Architecture. His primary passion has always been the drawing, but since the late ’70s, while travelling to distant places that have been little known then, like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Southeast Asia, and then North Africa and South America, he started using watercolors. Practical in view of his various relocations, with time the watercolor technique became his favorite medium. The watercolor gives him the possibility to capture the light, creating strong contrasts with shadow, between light and dark. The color is rich but pale, characterized by a whole range of shades. The scrupulousness that distinguishes his works, and precision in the drawing, bring him toward hyperrealism, which attenuates in the recent works that become more spontaneous, even though always remaining within the figurative art. The artist finds his subjects in the everyday life, in the urban sceneries of his own city, or in those that he gets to know during his journeys. Fixing the subject with his camera first, his realization always reveals his interest in and amazement by the world that surrounds us. People that he depicts in his works express lightness and calm, even when they are in the waiting room. Men that are represented old, transmit the wisdom and the humanity of their age. If we are to find out his ideal master, for Fabbri that is Alvaro Castagnet, great Uruguayan watercolorist, whose magic and instinctive style influenced the artist, determining the passage from the period dominated by the darker range of colors towards the creations of his last years, full of color and light. The reserved artist, staying off the main tendencies, during the last ten years presented his works in various individual and collective exhibitions. In his studio in Piazza Santa Croce, for the last ten years Gianni Fabbri has been engaged both as an artist and as the teacher of watercolor.