Stefano Fioresi

Stefano Fioresi was born in Modena on 28 July 1965.
He attended the Venturi Artistic High School in Modena and qualified in 1983 as a commercial artist.
His artistic sensitivity, his uncommon technical gifts that became apparent at an early age and his great versatile powers of expression and execution enabled him to gain different types of artistic and professional experience, also at the international level. In 1984 he decorated part of the Palais de la Culture in Algiers. He subsequently made decorations on glass for large-scale interiors, which was an experience that gave him the technical skill required to take on major commissions. A few years later he depicted scenes from the great motor racing competitions on glass panels for the headquarters of the Modena branch of the automobile Club Italia. Since 1989 he has been pursuing successful career in the advertising industry.nAt the same time he has been active in the field of graphic art. His favourite themes have always been connected with his passion for cars. One particularly important piece of work from this period is a series of panels for the headquarters of Ferrari in Maranello that provides a comprehensive view of the buildings that make up the headquarters of the manufacturer of the car with the black horse logo (1990). From the end of the nineties his creative work took a new turn in the direction of an artistic search for new techniques and themes. By using his experience in the advertising industry and by carefully rereading the elements of pop art of the seventies and eighties the artist has been able to develop a style that reinterprets the syntactic and visual elements of mass communication to activate a creative approach to artistic expression in the direction of New Italian Pop Art.

Review

The installation of Stefano Fioresi’s “Passion and Glory” realized for OPEN2OO6 is a clever example of image marketing. In his purest pop style, the artist from Modena chooses from the mass information circuits an icon that has been topical for at least two thousand years: the icon of Christ, scorned and abandoned by his Father. This is a symbol full of meaning for the whole of contemporary society: Christian, non-Christian and lay. We live in times when, once again, religions are dividing peoples and laying more stress on separating than on uniting them, thus going against the basis of every faith. The charismatic face of Christ who, in death, epitomizes the condition of every human being who has ever trod this earth, sums up all the fears, uncertainties and fragility of people. Fioresi takes his suffering gaze and transposes it onto the faces of six cubes, stacked one on top of the other to form a kind of modern pyramid four metres high.  Jesus raises his eyes while the nails pierce his hands. The obsessive reiteration of the scene repeats the theme of the work of art, there is no glory without pain. And the warning of that white face that seems to conquer space with a struggle reminds the man in the street of Heidegger’s invitation “to go back out into the open, as the ancients did, if we want to find the divine”. But our eyes, filled with technological images, have lost Erasmus’s craving for faith. To return to the heavens we will have to build a tower far higher than the Tower of Babel, and maybe even try to get there on foot.

Anna Caterina Bellati