Paranoid Fiction ~ Maybe You Should Feel Uncomfortable!

Last month I attended Fabrizio Passanisi’s art show“Paranoid Fiction” at Longview Farmhouse in Clayton. “Paranoid Fiction” is a surrealistic literary and film genre that includes works such as "Bladerunner” by Philip K. Dick or “Fight Club” by Chuck Palahniuk.

Artist Fabrizio Passanisi once told me that the atmosphere he wanted to evoke in his paintings was that of a “rainy day”. Being from Scotland, I could relate completely. I write best, or I should say, I find myself most in the mood to write when it's raining.

The night that I attended his art show “Paranoid Fiction” however, the sun was setting spectacularly on my drive to the Longview Farmhouse in Clayton:



Fabriz had also told me that he liked to take photographs from the car and create paintings from them. So the view itself reminded me of some of Fabriz’ moody, evocative landscapes:

Covert Mantra
24"X48" Polymer on Hardboard

This one was in the new show:
Suspension-Anonymity
24"X48" Polymer on Hardboard

Fabriz has told me that people generally respond best to his landscapes. They are beautifully haunting like a rainy day, just as he said and yet still familiar and accessible.

As I've written on my bio on this blog, words are my first love. It has taken me some time to “get comfortable” with going to look at art in public, especially at art shows. I often wondered if I was supposed to know if a piece of art was “good” or “bad”. I wondered if other people “understood” art better than me, and perhaps if they would judge me if I could not discern the difference.

Recently, especially through the course of many conversations with Fabriz, and attending his shows, I’ve learned that for me, what’s more important is how I feel about a piece of art. What emotions does it evoke within me, and why. This is one of my absolute favorite pieces of his:

            Let Go My Love
            35"X35" Oil on Hardboard

Fabrizio is a first generation immigrant, like myself. His family are from Sicily in Italy. When I first saw his art, what I thought I saw was the struggle of an immigrant, searching for a sense of belonging and meaning in a new country. Of course, as anyone would know from reading my blog, I was seeing my own story reflected back at me.

I also saw stories from history in the dreamlike, fragmented scenes. I saw images that made me think of Bosnia, Vietnam and even World War II. I saw a world torn apart and not yet stitched back together. There were fleeting glimpses of America’s consumer culture; endless televisions screens, a psychiatrist treating a woman on a couch. There were scenes made poignant when placed side by side; a ship going down, a happy couple in a restaurant, comfortably oblivious to the chaos in the world around them:

              While the World Burns
              35"X35" Oil on Hardboard

If you feel uncomfortable when you look at his art, maybe it’s because that’s what he intended, and because that’s what art is supposed to do from time to time. It is often purposefully meant to unsettle us, to make us question ourselves, the assumptions we've made about the world, even our most basic values.

Fabriz listened with interest and curiosity, not judgment to what I saw (and what many others saw) in his art. He named his show at Longview Farmhouse, “Paranoid Fiction”  in part because he believes that reality is subjective, and so is our response to his paintings. His work combines the ordinary with the surrealistic in a way that makes us look again because we notice something that we hadn't seen before, or that we now interpret in a different way because something has changed in our lives, because we feel different on the inside.

That’s the way good art can function … we transform the art by our gaze and are in turn transformed by what we see. You can see more of his work at fabriziopassanisi.wix.com/art. I personally can’t wait to see what Fabrizio will create next.

I’m a big believer that St. Louis has a secretly vibrant art and literary life and love to support St. Louis artists and writers on my blog. If you know of an artist or writer (or if you are one yourself) who should be featured I would love to know and help share their work.