Bart Roefmans, owner of Aporia Gallery, Bruxelles 2019

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Fabrizio Stenti is an estete, a composer, not with notes but with colors and color tones.

Stenti is a Belgo-Italian artist with roots in Naples, Italy, where he studied architecture.

My first impression about Stenti’s work made me think of ancient Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius and more specifically his work De Architectura libri decem.

This is Vitruvius’ opus magna and contains texts and drawings on architectural theory, philosophy and practices which have served as building guidelines during the Roman classical age up until and even beyond the post-Renaissance or neo-classical period. Stenti’s affinity with these architectural era’s is translated in his art in the form of paper collages which are meant as mosaics of pieces of paper which he found, collected and re-composed.

They are the building blocks of the final art piece. As such this reflects an archeological approach and I will not offend him by nicknaming Stenti as an archeologist. His practice of re-assembling bits and pieces of paper clippings in an effort to (re)compose meaning refers to Stenti’s archeo-historical way of thinking during the process of making art.

Striking is that Stenti does not represent any human presence nor visible human activity in his works.

He is focusing solely on the exterior side of physical forms that we can see in the façades of buildings and the architectural designs that he is drawing.

He marks these in an almost two-dimensional way as if he is drawing a map of what we must see. He works as an archeologist who is trying to discover the human touch in the materiality, the form and the function of the artefacts.

Stenti is looking for human traces in architectural set ups and these are not represented by the repoussoirs in Stenti’s art. It is the architectural set-up itself that provides the track of the human representation. If this is true, then we discovered a clue in understanding Stenti’s universe.

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