Salvage: Fabrizio Biviano
Past exhibition
Even my sure things fall through, 2024
Oil on Belgium linen
137cm x 183 cm
The title of the painting is borrowed from the eponymous title of an EP by an US indie rock band, Calexico. The painting represents a globular vase, traditionally associated with...
The title of the painting is borrowed from the eponymous title of an EP by an US indie rock band, Calexico. The painting represents a globular vase, traditionally associated with a fish tank, with four or five skulls at the bottom, and daisies, the stems of which seemingly are growing out from the skulls, their yellow and white flowers emerge from the vase. The vase is resting on the volume of Ross Coulthart’s In Plain Sight, a book investigating UFO sightings. The name of the author is partially obscured by another skull, positioned slightly to the left off centre. On the left-hand-side of the painting, there’s an arrangement of three stacks of paper cups from various stores: a red cup has a skull floating in it; just behind it is a stack of two cups, the white one with the Feels Good stamp, and a rim of a blue cup above it, with a single daisy sticking out; and behind is a stack of four cups, with the green one at the bottom, with a face, then rims of pink, white, and black cups, with the white featuring the planet Saturn. In front of this arrangement of the cups are two more skulls. On the right side, there’s a white paper cup, with the design of three red creatures, either microbe-like or alien-like, perhaps referring to the book, with two daisies sticking out of it;; next to it is a stack of three cups, green, with rims of blue and red above it. The green cup has an inscription only partially decipherable, with words Coffee and Good clearly visible; two more skulls are in front of them. The skulls are actually quite small, almost half the size of the normal paper cup. They are almost an inverse of Muick’s installation of oversize skulls from the collection of the NGV. Cute and humorous while still horrifying and repellent, they might be a reference to the UFO book, suggesting of alien races; to the fact that ‘paper cups’ are not as biodegradable as they are purported to be and are likely to outlast the human civilisation; and like in so many dystopian scenarios, when humans are gone, plant life will reconquer the planet. The humorous, miniature size of the skulls is perhaps also the Nitzschean exercise of out-monstering the monsters. Knowing the influence of Gericault’s ‘The Raft of Medusa’ on this body of work, it is possible to surmise that the positioning of individual skulls echo Gericault’s head studies.