Zoom

A central point in Davide Hjort Di Fabio’s (b. 1990) work is the decorative ornamentation, which with its repetitive and sometimes highly simplified patterns can branch out and connect to other styles and periods in both art and art history. That Di Fabio has chosen this time to present his own video recordings and ceramic works side by side with photographic reprints by the Danish painter Niels Nedergaard (1944–1987), who more than anyone cultivated repetition and pattern, here the delicate impressions of carved Islamic doors and shutters on the wall of his own room in Cairo, is thus also a way for the artist to create new aesthetic connections and affiliations; a way of opening his work to other, perhaps surprising perspectives. Add to this the exhibition’s title, Zoom, which points in several directions: to go into depth, to tune in, to focus intensely, to shift from close-up to panorama, to step forward for others, to meet. In a text titled Family Tree, Di Fabio has written about his fascination with the opulent ornaments and decorations of the Baroque and Rococo, including the use of gilded embellishments in the halls and chambers of the grand Palace of Versailles outside Paris. This free movement taken by the eye, as it effortlessly glides over doors and panels, frames and cornices and flourishes, similarly plays a role in the experience of his series of ceramic torsos, whose high-fired surfaces simultaneously invite the viewer to touch. The physical, material reality is therefore an integral part of the artist’s approach to ornamentation in these wall-mounted objects. Ornamentation is not merely surface and derivative repetition that produces a harmonious, well-behaved façade, but also the rhythm of a vital, wild heartbeat, the awareness of matter that, with an inherent transformative force, enters and adorns, activates life. It is the torso as a cast shell breaking free, offering itself and allowing the audience to come close, to sense, feel, touch, be touched. A bridge to that which rises and falls with breath. A desire, perhaps to feel and be felt. A sexuality. For Di Fabio, ornamentation is the gaze toward a force of expansion continuously unfolding like a tissue. The recordings of the older man’s bone-stretched skin, the satellite’s footage of the Earth. The body is read here topographically and in the light of the greater or lesser collapse of ecosystems, in the light of the monumental relief the artist has placed lying on a podium, a stage. A sharp gesture in which the work asserts itself with presence, performing in a staged light. A scientific and concrete approach to material that in its way contains traces of portals and markers. A rupture from the structure of the surface. From the Baroque’s gleaming gilded embellishments, through the discharge of energy in Nedergaard’s black-and-white study of movement, structure, and male beauty, to Di Fabio’s own controlled materiality. Nature and the divine also dwell in ornamentation. “love me before I go black / or love me so the darkness covers me / against death” (from Morti Vizki’s poetry collection Himmelstormere). Johan Zimsen Kristiansen, art historian (mag.art.)