“Fondazione ICA Milano” in collaboration with “Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Materials” presents the exhibition A breeze over the Mediterranean, first solo exhibition in Italy of Simone Fattal (Damascus, 1942).
Among the most important contemporary artists, Simone Fattal was born in Syria and raised in Lebanon. She fled the country in 1980 at the outbreak of the civil war, moving first to the USA and then to France, where she currently lives and works.
Fattal's research has developed and asserted itself in particular in the last decades, articulating itself in the use of different expressive means including drawing, painting and, since 1988 (when the artist attended the Art Institute of San Francisco), ceramics. In his works the artist brings out from the matter, such as the natural and living one of clay, forms that evoke the union between the carnal and mystical dimension, reality and imagination, shaping figures that restore the deepest intimacy of our feelings and our thoughts and connect them to the historical and cultural dimension to express the value and, at the same time, the delicacy and fragility of human life.
In early 2020, at the invitation of Fondazione ICA Milano and Pompeii Commitment. Archaeological Materials, Fattal visited the Archaeological Park of Pompeii in order to study the site and the archaeological deposits in person – a research that later flowed into the reflections and sculptural representations of A breeze over the Mediterranean.
Fattal observed the universal history and the multiple individual stories of Pompeii, drawing inspiration from the Pompeian artefacts, from their cultural, religious, social and historical archetypes and from their mixture of the mineral, vegetal and animal elements of which they were originally composed and the cultural functions that were attributed to them, before they became fragments in which every distinction between life and death, myth and history, natural and cultural, human and non-human is cancelled.
The numerous works on display, all made of ceramic, were created by Fattal in 2021 in Italy, at the famous Officine Gatti in Faenza.
"Unlike all other archaeological sites”, Fattal said in an initial sharing of his research on the portal and research center pompeiicommitment.org, “we can say that Pompeii already offers a reconstruction of itself. Because the place was not destroyed by time, but by a moment. Ruins, in the world, can be analyzed at many levels, but there are fragments of all periods, mixed together, stratified; we must reconstruct their origins and influences, the sequence in time. In Pompeii, however, the image is fixed. "
“The fixed image” of Pompeii proposed by Fattal highlights the coexistence between intense and reciprocal influences of a time in which, always according to his words, in Pompeii “Egypt is present, but also Syria and Asia Minor. And despite all these diversities and differences, apparently everyone lived together in harmony".
Fattal therefore evokes, in the works on display, not a city in ruins but a palimpsest whose multiple meanings and possible interpretations correspond to an archetype in which historia and fabula coincide, in which different Mediterranean cultures coexist, merging with each other and with the ecosystem that hosts them, fixed in an apparently eternal present and available to our gaze, which travels through them in wonder.
Simone Fattal's sculpture Hermes (2021) – directly inspired by the artist's visit to Pompeii – is currently being acquired by the Park, becoming the founding work of its new collection.
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