On July 11th, 2024, Harabel Contemporary inaugurated “Through”, a solo exhibition by artist Fabiola Skraqi, curated by Harabel, at GurGur Gallery.
Through
Fabiola Skraqi’s works in the exhibition “through” seem at first glance to be surreal landscapes, which immediately give us a physical, organic feeling. The strong colors almost seem to be ‘wet’, giving us a tactile sensation of a muscular, smooth surface. So as we continue to observe the artist’s canvases, we realize that we are indeed dealing with images that refer to the inside of the human body, even if we cannot tell exactly which part of the body. The bubbles that appear to be saliva, painted in some canvases, point us towards the mouth and more generally, to the oral tract of our body. Yes, but whose body? The work, as often happens, originates from a personal experience, in this case, a traumatic experience suffered by the artist years ago. A maxillofacial surgery lasting six hours, right in the oral cavity, prompted Fabiola to question her self-perception through the physical pain that accompanied her during her three-year convalescence. The research is introspective and develops through a cognitive process of one’s own body and its fragility, which inevitably affects the perception of the image of us towards others. The images produced by the artist were initially a ‘clinical’ tool for dealing with the post-traumatic condition, but later became a mirror for all of us. The artist deliberately inverts the common logic of our reflection in the mirror to address the fragility of the image we have created of ourselves. The oral cavity shown to us by the artist as an inner portrait, replaces the surface of our skin, giving us the opportunity to see how our identity is a continuous renegotiation between the inside and the outside, between the world inside us and the world outside us. In psychoanalysis, with reference to infantile development, the oral phase is the first phase of libidinal organization, during which the mouth, as the organ of nutrition and thus the center of experience, is the main source of pleasure and relationship with the world. Our relationship with the mouth thus starts from childhood and through the mouth and, more generally, the oral cavity, we begin to discover the world and begin to express our desires and problems. Through the oral cavity we produce sounds that express everything we are, and what we feel; thoughts, emotions, love, despair, anger, happiness. Fabiola Skraqi’s works are perhaps not surreal landscapes where we can abandon ourselves and move away from the space of our reality, but rather portraits, portraits that are also a means through which to explore the fragility of each of us, in a sort of anti-Narcissus capable of disarming the perverse dynamics proposed by social media and the society of the spectacle of the self.
Curatorial text by Stefano Romano