A significant personal exhibition by Fernando Garbellotto immediately captures the attention of specialists in the sector, due to the fact that it investigates the Venetian artist’s research starting from the works of the 1990s up to the most
current. In the suggestive medieval spaces of the Rocca – Center for Contemporary Art of Umbertide (PG), an important personal exhibition by Fernando Garbellotto will be held until 27 October 2024, which investigates the Venetian artist’s research starting from the works of the 1990s up to the most current ones, focusing on the aesthetic and formal aspects of his representations. The exhibition offers the public a complete review of Garbellotto’s work which knows how to combine, in the synthesis of content and form – the foundation of art as the always valid Crocean aesthetic theory wanted – science and art like few others in contemporary art.
The exhibition, organized by the Administration of the Municipality of Umbertide, inaugurated in the presence of the Mayor Luca Carizia and the Deputy Mayor and Councilor for Culture Annalisa Mierla, the curator Giorgio Bonomi and the artist. Around 40 works are on display with a methodological subdivision which will see, in the fascinating basements which preserve the stone walls, an installation of numerous “Fractal Networks” free works, without frames, which will hang from the ceiling in sequence, so that the public, in a sort of “participatory art”, he can pass through them, feeling, on the one hand, ensnared and, on the other, free.
In the two rooms on the first floor there will be an exhibition of “Earth Fractals” in one, and “Air Fractals” in the other, works from the 1990s created with the intention of describing, in a very small fractal scale, the world around us, the aerial one and the terrestrial one
extreme. On the second floor will be hosted the works that represent the synthesis point of the research of the last twenty years or the “Fractal Networks”, complex works, created starting from the early 2000s, conceived as real systems that draw their strength not from the individual elements but from the interaction between them: in the first room the monochrome ones mounted on a frame which will create a powerful symphony of colors on the walls, with a pressing “musical” rhythm and, in the second, the “FLUO Fractal Networks”, a series of smaller works, placed in plexiglas cases, all created in 2023, which stands out, compared to the previous ones, for the choice of colors – very bright, with vibrant and strong and sometimes fluorescent shades – and for the characterized composition from the combination of several frames side by side and sometimes inserted into other autonomous systems, each with its own network of networks which, all together, give life to the work completed. Garbellotto is known for being the painter of fractals, in fact this geometric figure, discovered not many years ago (in 1975 by Benoît Mandelbrot), constitutes the “scientific” content of his works. It is no coincidence that, in addition to the term/concept “fractal”, “node” and “network” (terms to describe the concreteness of the artist’s works) also belong to the field of science. The artist composes his work by knotting strips of pictorial canvas that are constantly repeated in a similar way to what happens in fractals, creating a web of interrelations, the network, the arrival point of the transition from the whole to the system. In his works the canvas is no longer a pictorial support but, cut and reassembled, becomes the tool for weaving and giving body to the complexity of nature. In the creation of knots, it transfers energy to the material, making it become 
system. Now, fractals are the contents but, given that we are in the territories of visual art, it should be underlined that Garbellotto is an “artist”, he is a “painter” in the full sense of the term, therefore he expresses his concepts in a very high artistic form, both for his technical ability in composition and painting and for his own and completely contemporary style, for example in the use of monochrome, the tendency towards “reduction” which, over time, leads him to a strictly orthogonal construction.
Fernando Garbellotto (Portogruaro,1955) lives and works between Milan and Portogruaro. His artistic research, which began after his humanistic studies and his degree in Law, developed in the Venetian context and took a turning point at the end of the 1980s when, fascinated by Mandelbrot’s theories on fractal geometries, he traced a new field of research that it still continues. In the first half of the 1990s he exhibited in various national public galleries and private spaces. In 1997 he founded the “Italian Chaos” movement in Milan with other artists with which he exhibited in many Italian and foreign public spaces including the Novosibirsk State Museum which acquired two of his works. In 2005 Paolo
Cardazzo produces his own monograph published by the Cavallino di Venezia.
In 2006 he arrived at the elaboration of what he himself defines as the synthesis point of his research: “Fractal Networks”. The exhibition activity is intense: at the Ripetta Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, at the Civic Museum of Albona in Croatia, at the Thetis Space in Venice, at the Calderara Foundation in Vacciago. In the period between the two important anthologies of Palazzo Tornielli in Ameno in 2009 and Palazzo Crepadona in Belluno in 2012, worthy of mention are, in 2011, the video performance at the Peggy Guggenheim in Venice, the participation, in the Italian Pavilion, at the Biennale of Venice, the presence at the exhibition “Tra – Edge of Becoming”, curated by Axel Vervoordt and finally the participation in the Venice Film Festival with the video “Fractal Net Singing”, whose soundtrack was created by Renato Miani and the pop star Elisa.
In 2014 he created the video: “Fractal Net Dancing” in London, in collaboration with the prestigious MET School. Between 2017 and 2019 he exhibited at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano, at the TAG Gallery in Lugano and, presented by Giovanni Bianchi, at the Civic Museums of Treviso in the exhibition “Space as a Condition – Mario Deluigi, Fernando Garbellotto” which sees him alongside the great master, his theoretical reference and source of inspiration.
Finally, in 2020 he exhibited his fractal networks at the Cesare Pavese Foundation in S. Stefano Belbo and in 2021 two important solo exhibitions, the first at the Federico II Museum in Jesi curated by Fabrizio Renzi, the second at the MACA in Acri. In the spring of 2022 he presents a solo exhibition in Milan, Palazzo del Senato and then at the Liptovsky Mikulas Museum in Slovakia. In the autumn of the same year another solo exhibition at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice. In April 2023 the Giovani Leoni ETS Foundation invited him to exhibit in the Barchessa of Villa XXV Aprile in Mirano and in September he was at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan with the solo exhibition FLUO. Also in Milan, between November ’23 and January ’24, he held a personal exhibition at the MudiMa Foundation.
2024 opens with the important Shelter Island project, created with Luca Pozzi, presented at the M9 Museum and set up in the two spaces of the Marina Bastianello Gallery in Venice and Mestre. In the summer of the same year he was invited to exhibit a series of Fractal Networks in the new headquarters of Generali Italia, in the prestigious spaces of the Procuratie Vecchie in Piazza San Marco in Venice. At the end of September he exhibited at the Rocca di Umbertide in the Estetica e Geometria exhibition.
Carlo Franza