Fabio Principe

Impact alters our perception of time and matter, just as trauma carves a furrow into memory and identity. Fabio Principe works his surfaces by incising, stripping away, layering and sanding them back, to examine the very process of change. Each gesture of his hand recalls the experiences that overwhelmed him, and leaves a trace behind.

When the pain recedes, the artist studies the furrow it leaves: the way will, an act of love, binds itself to trauma, until a new balance emerges from awareness and acceptance. The tension between these two forces becomes a universal language, leading the viewer toward a personal reflection on gestation and healing.

Stepping into the space of the work, the viewer forms a personal bond with its chromatic contrasts and its lived-in materials, which echo each person's own past. The mirror returns a reflection: an invitation to descend into the depths of one's own existence and see oneself, touched and shaped like matter. To look, and to accept.

Matter is integral to the message: it is the body that hosts the change. Layers accumulate on the base surface (paint, plaster, iron and other materials) and each pass alters the one before in wholly unpredictable ways, producing a surface that is always new and unrepeatable. As unrepeatable, after all, as the gaze of each viewer, in which different memories and experiences surface every time. The artist does not seek answers about what he has endured. He reflects on its permanence, and accepts building a new relationship with it.

Like those who look at it, matter carries a past of its own: every material he chooses already holds a history, a memory, which the artist brings back to light and keeps shaping, renewing it as he goes. Memory itself becomes a material to be worked.

The artist deliberately sets his research within a precise limit, and the numbering of the works declares it: one thousand is the measure he has chosen to inhabit it. The series moves backwards, from one thousand toward one, each work a step further into this space, seen from ever-shifting perspectives and angles. Principe wants to persist, to probe, to observe how his relationship with what marked him grows and changes, bringing to life works that each carry a trace of these ongoing discoveries.

Campo No. 1000/1000 is where this research begins: opposing forces find their reason for being only by accepting one another, building a balance that is reflected, in countless facets, across the matter. From here, Fabio Principe explores exposure, impact and awareness within the endless flow of events that is life.