This text is written by Heather Holden for an upcoming exhibition.
Fulvia Zambon
This exhibition of paintings presents a straight line of fantasy, figuration, and cityscape works that were created over a time period from 2003 to the present.
Fulvia was born in S. Ambrogio, Turin, Italy. In 1972, at nineteen, she relocated to Torino. While still a student she began illustrating for advertising agencies and publishers and in 1981 moved to Milano to collaborate in fashion illustration and with other advertising industries. There, represented by Hilary Bradford and Associates, she partnered with Lamberto Bruni in their private studio.
Continuing to work in Milano, Zambon began to study fine art in Italian art academies, mostly at Brera Academy. For five years until 1988, she studied mainly drawing and modeling of the figure. Her teacher Lydia Silvestri talked about planting the figure from the floor and letting it soar. Silvestri herself had learned this important lesson from her teacher, Marino Marini, who always emphasized the solidity of the figure.
This developmental period was during the Art Povera era when Italian Conceptual Art was at its heyday in Turino. Often reprehended by other artists for choosing erstwhile to work in the traditional Italian style, Zambon continued to prepare her future in classical figurative representation.
From these roots and at that time yearning for an escape from the pressure of her advertising career in Milano, Zambon moved to New York City in 1996 and immediately continued her painting. Since 2003, along with many other New York painters, she has frequented the Art Students League of New York, painting from models to link modern realism to the European classical traditions that she brought with her.
From 1977 to 2012 - thirty-five years in fact - she had been undergoing in-depth psychoanalysis directed by the Italian analyst Anna Fubini. This influence accounts in large part for the themes that prevail in Zambon’s work to this day. She had begun in 1993 to explore the potential of her unconscious mind in a series of paintings of empty dresses with babies. Followed soon after by her 1995 series of displaced babies, in a practice that at that time had evolved to include the creation of complete stage surrounds as elaborate still lifes for her paintings. These would be built within her large Williamsburg studio for the purpose of containing her complete mind-set, or as she expresses it more humbly, to represent her unsettling life and work styles at that time.
Professional evaluation of her personal dream journals continued until the analyst’s death in 2012. The influence was very apparent throughout the decade of 1993 to 2003, characterized by paintings that prominently featured infant and feline obsessions. These paintings prefigured some of the paintings in this exhibition, which are quite tame compared to her hard-core psychoanalytical paintings done that prior decade.
Relatively, these newer paintings seem more like playful romantic fantasies. Examples of these are The Lost Toy (2015), a painting that consists of a still life set in a corner of her current studio with a baby carriage and a baby doll along with a plant. About this painting, Zambon states that in viewing the baby’s face, something always seems missing as if unknown, lost, or deprived. The image for The True Cause for the Forest Fire (2018) originated as she was feeding squirrels in the park. A more fanciful idea occurred to her that the baby might have been found inside a peanut by a squirrel. And then to tarnish the playful humor she added a cigarette to the baby maybe, as she said because she herself was a heavy smoker when she was young. And of The Poppy Field (2019) her idea came after a cat-loving Italian friend visited her studio and adored her giant orange one. Mixing it with a visual memory of an older painting Narciso (date?), she visualized the friend protecting the cat via a person close to the water and a screen of poppy flowers behind distancing the outside world.
On the whole, releasing the potential of her unconscious mind added to the creative evolution of all of Zambon’s visual strategies including her portraiture. In 2003-05 when she again studied the figure at the Art Students League of New York she began the journey into the straightforward painted portraiture that we see in this catalog. It was again a teacher, Ronald Sheer, who impressed upon her the conviction that the face is at the heart of what the viewer sees in figuration. That distinction was not only significant to the success of her rendering, but it opened again avenues of consciousness, this time to the mind of the sitter. A decidedly mental landscape approach became seminal to Zambon’s portraiture from then on.
This comes across when she talks about her models. She has said that everywhere she looks she sees people with beautiful and interesting faces. Although she doesn’t interact with the sitters because most of them were done during sessions with other artists present, nonetheless, deeper impressions of the sitters’ attitudes and levels of mental sophistication become apparent in these portraits from 2003 onward.
During the first stage of a portrait, she makes an original drawing in charcoal that is consulted throughout to ensure the original likeness during the painting’s evolution. And although she doesn’t personally interact with the sitter over the period of a pose - which averages three hours a day for at least five consecutive days – she creates more than just a physical shell. At each session subtly different impressions of the same pose get painted, the final portrait catching all of the subtle mutations of the sitter. As it becomes more tangible the painting takes on its own wisdom for what she eventually senses to be a composite of all the sittings. Or as she has stated, the figure’s living breath is portrayed, with the moment to stop being revealed by the painting itself. Capturing those mutations that occur during a pose Zambon will intuitively empathize with the model in order to go beyond the visual. Rebecca W (2003) was one of the early paintings of professional models that seem literally to breathe.
Such will be the empathetic consciousness that continues in subsequent portraits. In Sara S (2017) we sense Zambon’s intuited sense of tenderness in the model’s pensive expression. With Sara M (2019) the model seems to have palpable defiance in her presentation of nudity. In Leila (2016) Zambon felt that the model was so comfortable in the state of nudity that she was able to spend mental energy scrutinizing the artists. Zambon understood Patrick (2016) to be a gentleman comfortable in the present but dreaming of past adventures. Mysterious Tibetan Man (2017) wanted to remain nameless and was a puzzle, and Corben (2016) was himself an artist who had such composure that he could hold the pose for an eternity and never move. The enigmatic Monica (2016) would always be smiling in life but maintain a completely serious pose in any position or dress.
It is as if she is saying there is a grave responsibility to art. When representing life on the canvas we tap into the sublime, we make someone beautiful or we just create something that can bring an unexpected smile.
Switching to how the actual painting is made, in Marissa (2012) we get a glimpse of how Zambon’s actual painting process develops. What this painting reveals, as the only unfinished painting in the exhibition, is an under-painting of warm and cold colors structured to notate the highlights and shadows within the pose and the background. It is her usual secondary stage of preparation beyond the charcoal sketch and usually hints at colors to come in a final painting. In this painting, the process was definitively stopped before the final stage so we get a glimpse of her deep level of perceptual engagement even early on. We see highly developed lights and darks, usually derived from direct daylight that encourages us to linger a while longer, thus making the work more enticing.
Working from the surrounds of her Brooklyn studios(s) she is an equally accomplished en plein air painter. Rather than painting the dramatic skyscrapers of our NYC skyline which being just across the river could easily be her view, Zambon prefers the Brooklyn side with its post-industrial left-over structures of our evolving Williamsburg neighborhood. She paints them to seem simple if not quaint. The views that were known during the high point of the Williamsburg artist community, she paints with an urgency of reality, of studio spaces in flight. Many of these buildings have since been altered into upscale residences or landmarked as historical, both plights eliminating artist studio usage.
Following her own flight from her Williamsburg studio, she moved to the Pratt Institute of Art area of Brooklyn, into another artist community. There she still paints in the outdoors during the summer. She often talks about her encounters with individuals who stop to watch her paint. One morning I personally encountered her painting under the Brooklyn Queens Expressway overpass. She was preparing a painting titled Wer A Jurgen, Brooklyn (2018) which is represented in this exhibition. It is one of her more modest scenes, an old building formerly a beer company. Conditioned by changes in the weather and the light as well as the activity on the street, she observes that buildings, like people, having changing presences. There is a tinge of nostalgia in their atmospheres derived from their disappearing architecture and history.
I note the traditional organization of her palette and her systematic laying of the paint into the charcoal drawing that was done on the spot during an earlier session. As she begins some final touches using some very classical tones I subconsciously associate them with the Sienese school of painting that I dearly love from art history. On view in this exhibition are other Williamsburg industrial architectural scenes such as The Pink Building(2004), Williamsburg Bridge from the Roof (2007), and Domino Sugar Building (2007). In them, I am rewarded with more of those classical pinks, siennas, others, and cadmium. Her paintings make me think harder about the rickety old red brick buildings of the Williamsburg, one of which I still inhabit, or to think at least about those that haven’t yet been torn down or altered to suit the developers. I see them with a newer romantic and even classical edge due to Zambon’s rosy representations.
Thank you, Fulvia, for sharing your difficult and devoted journey.
Heather Holden September 2019