Expat Profile – Tiziano Fabris

By Maria Carolina Baulo 

Tiziano Fabris was born in Vicenza, Italy in 1964. Since he was young, his spirit was meant to be free and always seeking adventure. When he turned 18, he dedicated one entire year to travel within Europe and decided to learn and contemplate the artistic wonders around. He has been related to a Franciscan convent in Umbria as well as the intellectuals in the Scuola Internazionale de Graffica in Venetia: he combined experiences in his own life and translated them into his art. That is exactly the kind of work he produced and still does. Always between Italy and Argentina (he lives and studies Art History in Buenos Aires), Tiziano Fabris captured in his pictures the tension between those countries. In his series Forbiche, back in 2004, he started working with the bonds that link the European traditions with the American countries. But in his latest exhibition, Extraño (Strange), in 2006 he approached that relationship introducing a new character: the immigrant. To do so, Fabris worked with clothes that used to belong to some of those immigrants: some of them family, some of them friends.

Absolutely independent, doing everything himself, Tiziano used those clothes as his canvas. A mixture of intense colors and abstract paintings, they carry the powerful effect caused by the “broken” images; broken but still related because a small part remains intact. Just as the feeling immigrants have in their hearts, some sort of cocktail that combines the inevitable uprooting nostalgia with the ideals and hopes that guided them to those countries so far away from home. Only from an outsider point of view, only as a foreigner that choose to be an Argentine, these images can come alive and tell their story.