Fabrizio Dusi is a modern artist. This is proven by his date of birth (1974), his versatility, and his ability to interpret aspects of contemporaneity. There is no doubt that Dusi is a person with powerful motivation, and that he is discovering his most effective form of expression in ceramics, after having been a web designer and painter. Today he is a professional ceramic artist, already at his young age. He is a versatile artist who works with the contamination theory that is constantly celebrated in magazines and debate all over the world. Perhaps the most obvious aspect of his work today is linked to the irony of depiction, in which images flow quickly, more closely linked to oral traditions than critical theories. They have much in common with contemporary comic art on one hand, and street art on the other, far more so than with art history books.

Street art became part of contemporary culture in the early 1980s, with the graffiti art by Keith Haring, Rammelzee, Kenny Scharf, Richard Hambleton, A One, Crash, Lee Quinones, Jean Michel Basquiat who at that time was virtually at the start of his career, and many others. This work was exhibited in Bologna in those years, in a show titled “Frontier Art - New York Graffiti.” Today, Fabrizio Dusi has entered this field from the main gate. His works are powerfully expressive, and go right to the heart of the matter, depicting problems in communications and relationships, fruitless attempts…

People try to communicate, but in actual fact they just create clouds of meaningless words, because no-one listens, is interested, or has patience (Parole al vento – words on the wind). These themes are acutely topical, created with the irony that facilitates their provocative bite and makes their message direct. Fabrizio Dusi has worked on many themes, but this is the one that identifies him most clearly.

The wall-mounted ceramic installation Bla Bla Bla could be considered as the artist’s manifesto, with a face depicted in outline, mouth wide open, emitting a vapour of elements that represent words spoken uselessly. It is a ferocious criticism of the excess of words that hallmarks the present time, but it is made with a light hand, in bright colours. The contamination of space adds joy, complicating the real and conceptual interchange between volumes and space, levity and weight – as Sharon Hecker noted – and between ceramics and painting. However, all this chromatic optimism, this onslaught of words, conceals something else.

Dusi is also close to Pop Art in his work, in its most direct and popular sense. He has not forgotten Keith Haring’s visit to Italy, summoned to Fiorucci’s stores in Milan in the 1980s, where, with his men, flying hearts and phalluses, he contaminated all possible surfaces: walls, furniture, display units, shop assistants, curtains, and the doormats outside the shop. Keith Haring’s was also a happy and apparently carefree invasion, but one that concealed the power of a virus, the total occupation of the space available, the dedication of all surfaces to a single theme.

The “heat” of communication, the true theme of Dusi’s artistic intentions, is indicated by the invasion of space. It is here that the artist will soon begin to operate, on a new scale that will require a further dimension of courage. From his status of delicate and often cheerful communicator, he will have to mount the bucking bronco of denouncement, accepting the social extent of his work without losing his characteristic levity. The virus will have to expand, and as the artist’s message becomes stronger, it will increasingly become uncontrolled. This is not an easy combination, but it is exciting, like all challenges.

The artist and craftsman, as Dusi describes himself, will put aside his overalls, and climb onto the scaffolding that will enable him to give his message a wider viewpoint. Not just one, but a thousand words will vomit useless words, rising on the walls, doors, chairs and objects that they encounter in homes, public places, factories (not disused, but those brimming with people), the environments of politics, in general, in all places where meaningless words resemble the discussions between artists and gallery-owners, suppliers and clients, fathers, mothers and children, employees and employers, students and professors, politicians and ordinary people. Discussions that continue every day, never getting any closer to mutual comprehension.

Fabrizio Dusi is ready. All that’s needed is the scaffolding.

Beatrice Buscaroli