Simone Fattal
Simone Fattal, Wounded Warrior, 1999. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Courtesy of the artist. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Artist Simone Fattal’s practice, which spans painting, sculpture, collage, books and publishing, has been influenced by classical sculpture, mythology and archaic forms, as much as by historical and contemporary events. Fleeing the Lebanese Civil War, Fattal settled in California in the 1980s, where she founded the independent publishing house, Post-Apollo Press, to support independent poetry and writing, Etel Adnan’s works amongst them. It wasn’t until Fattal enrolled at the Art Institute of San Francisco that she began to work in ceramic, a medium that has accompanied her throughout much of her artistic practice since. Sometimes, her figures in stone and clay find inspiration in her childhood visits to archaeological sites, yet they are infused with a keen sense of what it means to exist in the messy and complex political realities of today.
Traces of repeated manipulation, the artist’s touch, her fingers and the pressure applied, persist in Fattal’s clay-based artworks, which often teeter between abstraction and anthropomorphic figuration. In Etel Adnan’s words, “When Simone Fattal faced her first chunk of clay she did not hesitate. Her fingers, i.e. thedeepest forces of her mind, made out of this muddy mass a person standing. It was an act of creation. She found her world immediately. She re-created in one stroke the first man of prehistoric times, and she created him standing. She created not an object, but a surge, a movement, an essential movement, the one which separates the human species from the animal world, that is, at the same time, akin to him.”
For Biennale Gherdëina ∞, we present one such standing figure, from the Wounded Warrior series, for the way in which the artist appears to ask the question, what is the minimum possible gestures by which a lump of clay becomes animate, gains personality and presence? In the artist’s own words, “With clay, a piece is always animated.” In the context of Persones Persons, Fattal’s sculpture stands to ask deep questions around art’s own vitalist impulse, the potential animation ritual inherent in the encounter between artistic touch, material and history, an encounter which leaves a spectral, vibrant trace in the subsequent encounters one makes with the artwork. To war-torn chaos, Fattal’s works proposes a politics of life and ensoulment: as the artist herself has said, “life is stronger than war, and love is stronger than death.”
Simone Fattal
Simone Fattal, Wounded Warrior, 1999. Exhibition view at Sala Trenker, Ortisei, Biennale Gherdëina ∞. Courtesy of the artist. Ph. Tiberio Sorvillo
Artist Simone Fattal’s practice, which spans painting, sculpture, collage, books and publishing, has been influenced by classical sculpture, mythology and archaic forms, as much as by historical and contemporary events. Fleeing the Lebanese Civil War, Fattal settled in California in the 1980s, where she founded the independent publishing house, Post-Apollo Press, to support independent poetry and writing, Etel Adnan’s works amongst them. It wasn’t until Fattal enrolled at the Art Institute of San Francisco that she began to work in ceramic, a medium that has accompanied her throughout much of her artistic practice since. Sometimes, her figures in stone and clay find inspiration in her childhood visits to archaeological sites, yet they are infused with a keen sense of what it means to exist in the messy and complex political realities of today.
Traces of repeated manipulation, the artist’s touch, her fingers and the pressure applied, persist in Fattal’s clay-based artworks, which often teeter between abstraction and anthropomorphic figuration. In Etel Adnan’s words, “When Simone Fattal faced her first chunk of clay she did not hesitate. Her fingers, i.e. thedeepest forces of her mind, made out of this muddy mass a person standing. It was an act of creation. She found her world immediately. She re-created in one stroke the first man of prehistoric times, and she created him standing. She created not an object, but a surge, a movement, an essential movement, the one which separates the human species from the animal world, that is, at the same time, akin to him.”
For Biennale Gherdëina ∞, we present one such standing figure, from the Wounded Warrior series, for the way in which the artist appears to ask the question, what is the minimum possible gestures by which a lump of clay becomes animate, gains personality and presence? In the artist’s own words, “With clay, a piece is always animated.” In the context of Persones Persons, Fattal’s sculpture stands to ask deep questions around art’s own vitalist impulse, the potential animation ritual inherent in the encounter between artistic touch, material and history, an encounter which leaves a spectral, vibrant trace in the subsequent encounters one makes with the artwork. To war-torn chaos, Fattal’s works proposes a politics of life and ensoulment: as the artist herself has said, “life is stronger than war, and love is stronger than death.”
Caption for second image