Walk the sidewalk!
Wandering through city streets, in one’s own town, wandering through the street with one’s imagination switched to the ON-key. Fabio Bix is a Brescian artist who has done this. Fabio, who is the bard of reinvented physiognomy tales, has taken the street from a topsy-turvy perspective. Bix’s foot has eyes and if he thinks, it is neither by chance nor for 'its own sake'. Man moves around by means which are intent on their own motorial activity with his own footsteps. In both cases, he has an opportunity: detaching himself from inertia and letting the street into his mind with its content.
The advent of means of transportation has led people to dedicate a marginal yet safe territory to walking: the sidewalk. For Fabio the street has its own profile, he walks across it and the sidewalk is its boundary, the base of his narration. Taking pictures of objects that chance leaves on the ground and then brings together, Bix has woven the thread of his tales using images, stories to us common yet distant owing to their dimension. Crouching with the lens of his mobile phone, he has captured the perspective of one of Brescia’s suburban worlds, but which could be in any other town in the world. The sidewalk is a place geometrically infinite which plays home to whatever sign is left by the passing of man and nature. The paving slabs are the forestage for actors modelled by unaware artists (the passers-by), who from the height of their posture have abandoned subjects, action addresses, pose and emotion on the ground. Through images, the narration comes to life through the shapes of the objects which have lost their original function and have taken on a new one.
These shots speak of emotions which, when adult a man loses in expressive pureness. Bix’s artwork has them reemerge by the usual means of Art, transformed and readable, perfect in the dialogue between life and its 'refusal'. The concept is extrapolation with no manipulation. Fabio portrays things newly-clad (leaves, paper, bottle-tops… ), objects which reinvent themselves on a sidewalk, which lose their desertion because they have found someone who has recognized them as they are now. With the shot, they rise up out of the scene and fly into the imaginary. There is no construction but only the decomposition of the adult being and of his social role to regain the defining capacity of the form which belongs to childhood, to the time of discovery. Thus, from what defines a safe place to walk along, one sinks into the light of a world made of an upside down function, which reaches Bix by an upward movement compared to who or what 'falls' onto a pavement.
From Voloaraso