Tensional Creation: Luciano Fabro's Sculpture between Conceptualism and Abstraction

Abstraction in art coincides with at least two different ways of working on forms: their geometrical structuring, and their expansion up to the formless. A third way reveals the close relation between abstraction and conceptualism in art, being contaminated by the reduction of forms, the expression of ideas, and the development of creative processes. The poetics of Italian artist Luciano Fabro, in his words and works, is a considerable example of this last way to create abstract works. The author’s attempt is to identify some of the main theoretical cores of Fabro’s poetics so as to clarify his idea of sculpture in light of this approach to abstraction. To this end, in this essay he examines in particular: the deep relation between thought and action; the search for a behavioural balance in creating works; the relation between the physical plane of the work and the metaphysical one; the role of ideas and interaction in his pragmatic approach supposing that it is based on the primacy of what Dal Sasso calls “planning process”.