Under the Tuscan Son

On the pew-side wall of a small, neighborhood church in Stowe Township, in ashen grey and charcoal black, the ridges and crannies of sculptures are rendered tactile in Fabrizio Gerbino’s paintings: a chalice, a saint’s face, parts of a doorway’s frieze. Opposite, behind where the altar might have once been, similar faces and facades peer in soot colors, painted onto upright charred wooden peels from a bakery. There’s a mystery in these characters, but not a religious one: We know the story of the Madonna and child. These fragments come from a different tale, burdened by the same past that makes them proud.

“I don’t like to make anything too symbolic,” says Gerbino, his English weighted down with a textbook Italian accent. “It’s not about the symbol, but the story.”

But Gerbino’s story is full of symbols. His father, the painter who sparked Fabrizio’s lifelong need to create art; Florence, the birthplace of the Renaissance, home to Michelangelo and da Vinci, and to Gerbino; and Pittsburgh, birthplace of Cynthia Lutz – Gerbino’s wife – and the city which has allowed him to concentrate full-time on art. The fruits of Gerbino’s parting with Florence, and adoption of Pittsburgh, will be on display at the 5151 Penn Gallery in Garfield, in the artist’s new one-man show, Tria Prima, opening Fri., Dec. 1.

A New Home
When Fabrizio Gerbino first traveled to Pittsburgh, and deeper still into the western blue-collar suburb of Stowe Township, he turned to his wife and questioned her judgment. For a decade and a half they’d lived happily in Florence, surrounded by the Tuscan beauty and Renaissance art which had fed Gerbino since his childhood.

“When I first came here, I said, ‘where are you taking me to? What are you doing,’” says Gerbino, Lutz laughing nearby. Soon afterwards, however, Lutz’s childhood neighborhood – where the couple found not only a home, but the deconsecrated church in which Fabrizio works – found its way into his heart. “I sat in a chair with other men from the local bakery, and I say, ‘it’s perfect.’ There’s nothing here – it’s perfect.”

Nothing, that is, in terms of artistic history – something of which Florence, and perhaps Gerbino himself, has too much. As a child, the artist was surrounded not only with the churches and museums of Florence, but the Milanese art dealers for whom his father painted. At 10, Fabrizio made his first professional painting, which his father slipped into one of his shows. “The art dealer told my father, ‘you should paint like this painting, every time,’” says Gerbino.

Gerbino studied art for eight years in Florence before striking out on his own, first, primarily, as a sculptor of publicly displayed works. Later, Gerbino returned to painting, which remains his main medium. But as the artist points out, the atmospherics of sculpture – attachment to place, the importance of installation and context – remain vital in his painting. For example, his upcoming Tria Prima show includes a series of paintings of the portale of a Florence church, destroyed years ago in a fire. And while the series contains around a dozen paintings, with only weeks to go before the opening, Gerbino is still locked in argument with himself over how many belong in the exacting science of their hanging.

“In my painting, there is also a sculpture or installation mentality,” says Gerbino. “When I went the first time in [5151 Penn], I could see the show. I think about the installation, the relationship between things.”

New Inspiration
The spaces that attract Gerbino share some characteristics with his personal story and his newfound home: He has painted an abandoned zoo and an empty concrete factory while working out of a disused church in an oft-forgotten neighborhood. It’s as though, in his art and life, Gerbino seeks an optimistic view of empty space – it is merely waiting to be filled, like the canvas he calls, “My 36-by-36 problem I need to solve.” In Florence, however, that emptiness was harder to find.

“It’s not easy to be an artist in Florence,” says Gerbino. “You always feel a little bit like a student compared to the great [Renaissance] artists.”

“There are a million tourists that go to Florence each year for art,” says Lutz, “and it’s [everywhere there]. Sometimes Fabrizio will say, ‘this really is the new world,’ because there’s none of that here.”

Gerbino understands fully that, whether in Florence or America, the weight of that history remains on his artistic shoulders. In “Tria Prima,” the piece for which his show is named, Gerbino confronts his history head on with three miniature copies of paintings of the Holy Family, one each by Michelangelo, Botticelli and Rafael, comprised of innumerous individual dots. The result, like so much of Gerbino’s painting, is visually and emotionally stunning. Within Tria Prima, the piece’s display will be equally so, set aside, in a separate room at the far end of the gallery, reminiscent of the cabinets in which miniatures by Florence’s masters are shown.

“I made these one year before I leave Florence, as a way to say, ‘Florence, goodbye,’” says Gerbino.

The “Tria Prima” miniatures took Gerbino two months of long, daily work to complete, a disciplined approach which he’s taught himself with other projects such as “La Via” (“The Way”), a set of hundreds of identical boomerang-shaped sculptures – he made one a day for two years – which Gerbino arranges in site-specific formations. Gerbino’s discipline, however, goes beyond work ethic.

“When you buy my painting, there are always three or four paintings below it,” says Gerbino. “If I see my painting and think, ‘it’s a beautiful painting,’ I try to have the courage to paint over it. My painting is tentative. Inside tentative painting is good painting – not [merely] ‘beautiful,’ but ‘good.’”

Rolling out the red carpet
It’s this kind of control that attracted Pittsburgh artist Alexi Morrissey to Gerbino and his work. Morrissey not only saw Gerbino as someone he could learn from, but someone he could help introduce more fully to Pittsburgh. Which is why Morrissey arranged for and curated the show at the newly opened 5151 Penn Avenue, operated by Stephan Koledin and Rosemary Barton, with curatorial assistance from Pete Popivchak of Wall-to-Wall Studios.

“Fabrizio’s got such amazing talent and work ethic,” says Morrissey. “And I thought, ‘if this guy doesn’t get the red-carpet treatment in Pittsburgh, it’s our fault.’”

In some ways, Gerbino is a Pittsburgher. After all, it was moving here –escaping the expensive and stifling atmosphere of Florence – that allowed him to become a full-time artist for the first time in his life. Gerbino represents a new kind of immigrant success story – a new twist on the American Dream.

“Fifty years ago, lots of Italian men came to America,” says Gerbino, “but they came because, at home, there was no food! I had plenty of food, but there is a conceptual food here. This – this is a conceptual immigration.”