Fabiola Gironi: The Dreaming Vessel

In this new series, Gironi explores the symbolic and emotional charge of domestic spaces.  She is merging autobiographical experience with cultural myth and drawing on her lived experience to pair with symbolic objects and imagery.  Forging connections between the ordinary and the profound, her paintings balance representation and abstraction and delve into psychological archetypes, dreams, and cultural references, weaving together a narrative that is both deeply personal and simultaneously universal.

Depicting objects tied to Mediterranean decorative arts, Gironi invents her own embroidered fabrics, patterned maiolica ceramics, floral arrangements, and terra-cotta female heads in these paintings.  Punctuated by bits of hand embroidery, the paintings are formal yet playful.  There is a sense of catching a moment: a cat languidly wrapped around a vase, steam rising from a cup of coffee, the sprout of a new plant spreading its leaves.  The impermanence of a moment is balanced with the dusky evening or night sky visible through windows in the background.  These objects from our lives will change and disappear but the day will turn to night and the morning will come again.

Gironi was born and raised in Italy and moved to California after finishing her university studies.  Her paintings draw inspiration from artists ranging from Italian Renaissance painters such as Veronese to Diebenkorn and the Bay Area Figurative painters.  Now living in Los Angeles and steeped in the saturated light of Southern California, Gironi works with a jewel toned and intensely rich palette.  Her process of layering acrylic, oil, color sticks, and occasionally wool embroidery results in paintings that are dynamic and elegant - structured yet playful.   Often depicting objects from domestic spaces, the paintings are formal yet unexpected in their compositions, enticing in their luscious colors, and carry a quiet, almost dreamlike quality.

Gironi is connecting and exploring past and present in her paintings as she does in her own life - she is examining her Italian roots and self identity against the backdrop of her daughter’s childhood in the States.  She is weaving the complexities of being a working artist and a mother into these paintings.  Using the orchestrated compositions of the Italian Renaissance as a formal guide, Gironi is is imbuing these formalities with her contemporary lived experience.