Fulvia zambon
Artist's Statement
Painting baby carriages is not so different to me than painting human forms or abstract images. My process is to find a way to make a widely recognizable object more interesting through the use of color and light.
In the 1970's when Warhol used the Campbell's Soup can, I was greatly impacted. At this time in Italy, viewing a soup can as an object of art was a powerful visual experience. Looking back at an earlier time in my life when I was exposed to Picasso I see that a seed was planted. At about the age of six or seven I saw the Analytic Cubism or Picasso. To see how an artist needs to pass under very unusual and painful processes of the mind in order to achieve such unique solutions would return at a later point in my life. The creation of valuable inventions that do not follow normal day by day process of work but rather combine alertness and circumstance to produce unexpected twists in my work.
In the early 1980's I was in London. I saw both Francis Bacon and David Hockney paintings. Two different works but both very important. At that time these artists showed me where humans were at that particular time. I was not finding the relationship with current time and figurative painting in Italy. The gorgeous paintings of the past did not speak to me of what I was seeing in my life.
The Master painters of the past were capturing their period of time in which they lived. This is when I realized that I did not want to paint stories of the past.
Hockney was showing drawings with a simple medium, colored pencils. These works were light and beautiful and took my eye. Francis Bacon distorted the human figure. I will never forget the first impression these works had on me. I saw a deep relation with him, also as if my nature is gentle and delicate with a kind of favolistic imagination. Again, the seed was planted and became clear with my work after 25 years in the distorted babies that I often paint.
Today I continue to paint the figure, the involucre of body, dresses without bodies, like missing humans. In the recent past I found three baby carriages in the street. Without creatures inside, these carriages came across my path one after the other. Seeing these carriages on the street in such random places they took the shape of automobiles or a shell. The wheels related with a complicated mechanical system and the frame was the skeleton with a soft interior, like the human body.
The addition of babies or partial babies came after looking for some action or gesture.
It is important to accurately paint the objects and faces while keeping the setting obscure. This is my way to keep the focus of my work on the subject.
The world in which I live is the scene in which I create. From the inside of my Brooklyn studio I have a few baby carriages and pieces of dolls that live with the sharp presence of deadly conflict in opposite parts of the world. Shortage of food and water, animals skinned alive in the factory for their fur, the horror of the factory farm. There is not so much that one person can say, as a painter I choose to paint few baby carriages, what I can.
Williamsburg Brooklyn 4/7/2008
