Fabrizio Dusi’s regular guy with the casual sports tee-shirt and jeans looks upwards, slightly sideways, or straight ahead, opens his mouth and spews out a host of expressive, colorful “words.” Is he speaking, singing, shouting? What is he saying? To whom?

Sometimes Dusi’s regular guy is talking to someone else: a regular girl. They engage in a “conversation” that flows between them in a brightly colored rush, a discourse that joins and separates them at the same time. For both, body language remains still: the figures are all “content and no action.” (1)

Whether a viewer happens upon one of Dusi’s works in an art gallery, a private home or a public space, for example on the façade of the Cova Ceramic School on Corso Vercelli in Milan, one cannot help but stop to admire the work and the workmanship. The anonymous, cartoon-like figure’s “texts” seem to float up into the sky effortlessly, like little juggler’s balls or fluttering, irregularly-shaped clouds, or they bounce between the two figures in a vibrant visual interchange. These jugglers juggle with their mouths, not with their hands, which always remain firmly down by their sides, bodies unengaged, disengaged.

On closer inspection, Dusi’s unusual use of material takes on importance. This apparently nonsensical conversation now reveals itself to be about much more than what happens between two people, for Dusi has attentively constructed levity and jocularity by crafting a dialogue between sculpture and painting. His works bring together a sculptural attention to the effects of verticality, which draws the eye upwards, and painterly horizontality, by hanging the installation unconventionally, on a wall. The result is a series of works that are at once textured, hand-modeled three-dimensional ceramic objects and flattened out, artfully painted two-dimensional images. Dusi cleverly reverses this technique in his “paintings,” works that are crowded with multiple, repetitive images of talking heads, for which he uses canvases that he “paints” by covering them with shiny enamel.

Emptiness and fullness are the key terms that define Dusi’s work. The packed masses in the paintings contrast the airy and light floating “words” of the single figures represented in the sculptures. Emptiness and fullness extends to the very way Dusi conceives of his materially sculpted “words,” some filled with color, others simplified into a silhouette. The works themselves are at once physically light and heavy, for ceramics is a not a weightless medium easily attached to a wall.

Dusi’s choice of medium has precedents in the Italian tradition of modern artists experimenting with ceramics, such as Fausto Melotti and Lucio Fontana. Fontana is known for his more famous slashes, but his early career involved extensive work in ceramics, and he later used the technical sculptural knowledge he had gained through ceramics in order to produce his later slashed paintings. Fontana’s ceramics often played on the border between two and three dimensions, especially when he created art for public settings. In Milan, for example, hangs the powerful fluorescent frieze entitled Battaglia under the movie screen of the Cinema Arlecchino (1947), as well as the textured, creatively glazed Via Crucis panels for the Church of San Fedele in Milan (1947-57). Like Fontana before him, Dusi transforms a medium that has functional and craft connotations into works that have artistic purpose.

Dusi’s artistic interests also extend beyond national borders. His love for French artists from the early and mid-twentieth century such as Fernand Léger and Jean Dubuffet connects him back to other great material experimenters. Léger’s pre- pop art style fits Dusi’s notion of visual simplification, and the former’s love of saturated color glazes can be found in Dusi’s art as well. Léger’s impulse to turn to ceramics late in his career as a painter in a search for cooperation with architecture is noteworthy when thinking about Dusi’s sudden urge for a transition from computer graphic designer to ceramicist. And Dusi shares Léger’s desire to be his own boss, following his artwork from its moment of conception to completion. When Léger installed kilns in his studio in Biot in the South of France in 1949, he seemed to feel the need for an autonomy that was not part of the traditional division of labor between creator and executer of sculpture.

Dusi’s inspiration comes from more recent times as well. His appreciation for American artist Keith Haring ties him to the worlds of street art such as graffiti, and he shares Haring’s fascination with the power of the line—simple, direct, on the wall. Like Haring, Dusi draws freely on the language of the cartoon, and it is tempting to see in the “regular guy” a connection with the tradition of American cartoon strips such as Dennis the Menace or Calvin and Hobbes. This brings up the question of speed, for comic drawings and graffiti are quick doodles, but Dusi subverts this by making them in a medium that requires quite the opposite, given the fact that ceramic is a slow, multi-step process. Finally, Dusi’s own inspiration for his works, the Milan metropolitana or subway system, recalls Haring’s fascination with the New York Subway system as source of his creativity.

Dusi’s desire to draw creative energy from the metropolitan din and then return his art back to the public spaces of the city reminds us of Fontana’s early interest in site-specific ceramic art. But Dusi’s installations take Fontana a step further. His works play with their surroundings, mixing with their environments, commenting on them with irony. Unlike Fontana, who never mined titles to undermine his own art, Dusi adopts witty titles, which tell us that his art has a social message. The sculpture series, called Bla bla bla, and the paintings, entitled Folla (Crowd), would suggest a kind of vacuous chit-chatty, echoic and blasé kind of small talk of little value, an empty form of communication that simply fills up space and replaces real words, yet again playing with the notion of empty and full. An example of how Dusi combines a craftsman’s skill and a sense of intellectual irony is found in the silhouetted forms of Parole vuote (Empty words).

It is also seen in an outside installation called Parole al vento (literally “Words to the wind,” an Italian expression for words that have no meaning or weight), in which the guy faces a real tree and the “words” seem to be propelled backwards, back in his face and over his head by an invisible windy force above and behind him. Dusi’s art therefore also refers to a kind of colorful emptiness of today’s light and spontaneous modes of human communication. This message takes on added irony when he installs a Bla bla bla work over a conversation area in a living room or over a couple’s bed. The heaviness and lightness of polite and even intimate conversation extends from the ceramic itself to the real words one imagines being exchanged below the sculpture.

By selecting ceramics as his preferred medium, Dusi has chosen an ancient medium to communicate a timely modern theme. Yet his return to ancient origins can be instructive on another level as well: things happen when people seem to be making small talk. In Ancient Greece, even apparently senseless words had potential to be fertile. One thinks of the tale of Echo and Narcissus, where Hera and Echo speak while Zeus makes love with the nymphs in the background, creating what has been termed a kind of “covert fertility.” “Within words, behind words, Zeus is always making love with the nymphs.” (2)

Dusi’s sculptures are about “bla bla” as much as they are about what meaningfully happens around them, above them, below them, behind them, within them. Words referring to nothing specific or factual, words/non-words that are color-ful, shape-ful, seductive.

Sometimes Dusi even allows empty and full to mix together playfully, as in the case of his Apollo, installed on the staircase of the Cinema Apollo in Milan. It is fitting that the artist chose to represent a silhouette of an Apollo not only because of the name of the cinema but also since the golden sun god (note the tiny sun Dusi has used to fill out the gaping “O” of his name) was god of music, poetry, and fine arts. Dusi’s focus on a single real word is a noteworthy shift in his artistic practice from the colorful balls and abstract forms. His choice of word is also curious. The beautiful, youthful sun god was an oracle, and thus his words were portent and full, pregnant with meaning, the exact opposite of “bla bla bla”. So Dusi’s regular guy has become a modern-day Apollo, an oracle of nothingness and non-sense.

If Dusi’s Apollo speaks his name from a thin silhouette of a body, the artist’s most recent works have been disembodied from their speaker’s mouth. Now words themselves take on their own powerful charge. Even without figures, these works play with the classic words exchanged in a lovers’ discourse, an intimate relationship between two people, pared down and simplified to a clever essence. In his un-gendered E alla fine ha detto di no (“And in the end he/she said no”), Dusi releases a loose colorfully optimistic flurry of upwardly-bound ceramic “si” (yes), which ends on the bottom corner in its inversion: a sharp, final, unexpected red neon “no,” thereby negating all that has come before it. Transforming ancient ceramic into modern neon for his final word, he replicates the gesture in two opposing materials but negates and anchors the power of the many mobile, ascending “si”s with respect to the strength of the brilliantly lit but firmly horizontal single “no.”

Or, vice versa, a final change of heart, a gradual release and letting go of resistances: E alla fine ha detto di si (“And in the End S/He Said Yes”) is a long line of hand-written, categorically black ceramic “no”s on a wall leading downwards to the ground, gradually lowering the viewer’s eye, which suddenly, unexpectedly resolves itself in a single golden ceramic “si.” There are sexual innuendos here: no no no, ok yes. Rather than carrying us up, verticality here takes us down under to a place where no really means yes. But reaching the bottom is also revelatory and promising. Materiality is the protagonist: ceramics here ably play on the alchemical color pairing of the transformation from the dark original materia prima to the arrival at the hard-won, golden final opus.

Finally, Dusi reclaims the body: ceramic and neon connect and disconnect in a pulsating work called Love, where male/female male/male have their corporeal say in the matter: love at the top is mirrored below by two pairs of ceramic silhouetted figures with bright neon genitals (or is it the figures’ bodily response to primal urges that generates and reflects the word “love” above them)? We have gradually moved from the mind to the body, from the airy senseless words to the lit-up literal genitals. What began as a courtship of language, sometimes colorful, sometimes empty, sometimes meaningless or even misleading, now becomes the most basic visceral engagement between bodies. As Dusi seems to be saying, when we stop making sense, when words are no longer meaningful, the body takes over in all its sense-less sensuality.

“Somebody calls you but you cannot hear get closer to be far away only one look and that's all that it takes maybe that's all that we need.”

Talking Heads, “Girlfriend is Better,” Stop Making Sense

NOTES