[...] It takes courage, today, to do painting. In an age that has lost its sense of the material, where every human intervention seems replaceable by technology, using dyes and brushes is a nonconformist choice, as are the acceptance of secular rites, long studio apprenticeships , and trying and retying again, always starting from the beginning. Fabio Romano is one of those brave individuals who have decided to live for and in painting, giving up the euphoria of the new, and bearing the cross of memory, the comparisons with icons of the past that, as claimed the great Lucian Freud - are so powerful that you cannot even imagine how anyone could have created them or how they might never have existed. Stuff to make your veins tremble in your wrists. Especially since, in his perilous navigation, our man threw the lifejacket of ‘graceful drawing’ to sea, instead focusing everything on oil painting, the equivalent of organic matter, confident in its ability to shape the universe. Fabio works on the first, concerned, as he is, about the materiality of painting, preferring a dense and structured coloured surface [...] .

Me, the other I 2007, oil on canvas, cm 70 x 80, private collection

I cannot say exactly when it began. Of course, from the beautiful landscapes, sun drenched, perfect, Mediterranean, from the rooftops articulated in aerial sequence with which, fresh off his first solo exhibition, documented by a rich and important catalogue for a young man of only twenty, Fabio Romano landed in Rome at the end of 2008, when things began to change [...] Indeed in Rome, Fabio Romano - maybe names are never accidental - seems to have understood the scope of the responsibility that his being, and first of all subject, entailed. The possibility and even the need to scramble all the cards, to be "contemporary", as sentient subject, to history, to classical style, to the universe, whose spheres have been put to play, discovering the cord of poetry. I confess that, more than once, for some of these paintings, the words of ‘The Night’, from the Canti Orfici by Dino Campana, have come to my mind: «I remember an old city ... Enormous emptiness of bridge-arches over the stagnant river dried to thin leaden puddles: a black moulding of mosquitos shifting and silent along the banks: among the dazzle and glare of a distant cane-brake the far-off naked figures of teen-age boys and the Hasidic beard of an old man: and suddenly out of the midst of the dead water the mosquitos came and a song, primordial dirge from the voiceless swamp monotonous and irritating and time ground down and held still».
The night, which brings all realities closer, which renders the divided awareness of our daytime self just an intermittent pulse, only an act of listening between Self and Other – the entire Other - and becomes aware of the totality, of the vibrant relation of everything with everything, it is this night which has acted as his guide. Fabio Romano has taken this responsibility upon himself".

Extract from the critical text Fabio Romano and the bet of the improbable by Giovanni Chiesa, published in the artist’s solo exhibition catalogue with Galleria Lo Magno

***

[…] Fabio tells his story. And I imagine him as a child, at his uncles’ farm – fragile, delicate, difficult, solitary – chasing after the grass, itself chased by the wind, the very green grass of Sicilia, adorned with red, yellow, blue, in spring … […] the blinding green of Africa, that Fabio incredibly managed to render from my accounts, without ever having seen it for himself – is it the colour of hope? This young, fearless painter, of intense talent and sensibility, will he be a Prophet? […] .

Extract from the critical text The Boy who Played with the Earth by Francesca Lesnoni, published in the artists’ solo exhibition catalogue for ‘Dynamic of the improbable’ with Galleria Lo Magno

Torso 2009, oil on canvas, cm 116 x 90, private collection
Paint published as the cover of the book Un cuore di troppo, Aldo Busi - Mondadori Edition © Fabio Romano and Aldo Busi

Torso 2009, oil on canvas, cm 116 x 90, private collection
Paint published as the cover of the book Un cuore di troppo, Aldo Busi - Mondadori Edition © Fabio Romano and Aldo Busi