Artist Platform Winter 2021
Fabio Rovai
by FABIO ROVAI
“My practice was always deeply influenced by the definition of a medium to express my inner self.
In my past life, I was a photographer, I had a photographic background and I existed in that dimension. However, photography tends to worry too much about technicalities and doesn't fully consider its own medium history.
So I decided to move away from my biggest limitation, the photographic instrument, to create synthetic images. A process that I found extremely contemporary, and where I used generative adversarial networks for the most part of it. GANs are one of the most fascinating parts of AI relationship within art and plays deeply on the relationship between generated images and the input images, in a sort of fight, which collides with the idea of viewer and subject which stands at the basic of photography.
And switching this paradigm allowed me to move more freely in a new dimension, created not only by what is expressed on my artwork but on the process of its creation.” Fabio Rovai
Artist Bio
“Since I have memory, I have been involved in art.
Coming from a family of painters, my concern suddenly matured in media and technology, which I studied in high school.
When I turned 20, I met one of Vogue’s photo editor, and it began my interest in photography, influenced by different issues photography was questioning. Then, I moved to London, attracted by the aesthetic of the city, and which changed deeply my way of making art and its relation with fashion. Studying in such a cosmopolitan city, made me conscious of different medium and way to experience the artistic practice, and throughout my undergraduate study I shifted often a way of conceiving art, and in this occasion, I felt in appreciation with primitivism and 60’s art.
This passion got me closer with the London art scene, I start to work in a gallery and I started to travel a lot to go to exhibitions, art fair and where I did a lot of book/manuscript haunting. This sort of primitivism aged somehow well, and I start a sort of aesthetic research which was living in the middle ‘arte povera’ and state of the art technology.
Every decision I ever made was deeply influenced by my obsession with discovering new things, encounter new challenges and formulate an unconventional way to understand the reality we are living it.” Fabio Rovai
