Contemporary artist Fabio Viale has been sculpting marble since the age of 16. His passion for this material first led him to design architectural elements and statues for the Monumental Cemetery of Milan.
Fabio Viale's creations reveal disturbing imitations and transformations of the material, in line with artists who tried to represent reality to the point of illusion and sculptors who, a few centuries earlier, transformed marble into animated bodies. Through meticulous work, the artist explores the full potential of this material : the marble seems to have the texture of smooth bulging rubber, of delicate fibrous paper, of rugged, aged wood... or even that of pigmented skin.
Ordinary objects turn into genuine works of art by being represented in marble, while famous artworks admired for centuries are covered in tattoos or carved from polystyrene. These allusions to contrasting time frames and conceptions of beauty either connect or confront each other. Depending on the point of view, they can be considered as either transgressions of the past or bridges between the past and today.
Fabio Viale's artworks have been exhibited worldwide, mainly in Italy, China, Russia, and the United States. In 2014, he was awarded with the Cairo Prize, a major contemporary art award in Italy, for having designed Ahgalla, a fully-functional marble ship which gave rise to several exhibitions and flotation performances. In 2019, he took part in the 58th Venice Biennale and contributed to the creation of an installation reinterpreting Venice and its lagoon.
Exhibited in a public place for the first time in France as part of Un Été Au Havre, Fabio Viale's sculptures will be displayed in the Villa Maritime gardens, fitting perfectly with the late-19th-century architectural style of this jewel of the seafront.
