FABIO RONCATO
The dreams you have when you are away
“The dreams you have when you are away” is an exhibition conceived following the artist’s residency at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris. The exhibition was designed as a staged journey, a kind of itinerary retracing the artistic research of Fabio Roncato.
Paris therefore represents the final stage of a project that began in the Netherlands and subsequently developed in China and the Balkans. Artistic practice becomes an exploratory technique – a means of crossing territories and engaging with communities and their cultural and scientific heritage.
During these travels, the study of the processes and behaviours of the materials composing the landscape became not only an artistic practice but also a tool for orienting oneself in space. The works, developed step by step, are conceived to awaken matter from its state of sleep and initial torpor, allowing it to develop its own form and memory and an independent relationship with the viewer.
The ultimate aim of this journey is to formulate an awareness of one’s surroundings based not on the representation of things but on the exercise of imagination. This final stage – made possible through the collaboration between the association Contemporalis and the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris – saw the creation of a new group of sculptures from which the exhibition takes its title.
Fabio Roncato, born in Rimini in 1982, lives and works between Milan and The Hague. After graduating in Painting from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, he further developed his practice through several residencies in Italy and abroad, including Atelier Bevilacqua La Masa (Venice), VIR – Via Farini in Residence (Milan), Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte (Turin), Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), the Shanghai Prize – East China Normal University (Shanghai), and the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris.
In his recent work Roncato reflects on the limits of visual representation by investigating forms, elements and energies of nature and contemporaneity. His aim is to place artistic practice within the critical relationship between our understanding of reality and the limits imposed by sensory perception. Unpredictability in the relationship between matter and artwork, together with imagination as a tool for understanding, plays a fundamental role in his artistic research.