harmonic dynamism between color, frequency and gesture
curated by Germana D’Aloisio
May 30 – June 25, 2026
Orizzonti Arte Contemporanea
Piazzetta Cattedrale, Historic Center, Ostuni
There comes a moment, before certain paintings, when the gaze stops searching and begins to listen. This is what happens with the works of Nunzio Di Fabio: the canvas does not offer itself to be read, but to be heard. This is not a convenient metaphor; it is the very premise from which his entire research emerges.
Di Fabio did not arrive at painting by a direct path. His journey passed through places unlikely for a painter: esoteric texts, sonic geometry, Pythagorean proportions, and the forests of Latin America. Ten years of travel immersed in an almost untouched nature, where contact with the elements — earth, water, air, fire — was not an aesthetic experience, but one of study, measurement, and listening. From this profound immersion arose a conviction that still guides every gesture on the canvas today: sound and color belong to the same energy. This is not a form of romantic synesthesia, but a structural correspondence — angles, wavelengths, frequencies, harmonics — which Di Fabio learned to read long before learning to paint with color.
The mandalas of the 1990s are the first visible manifestation of this knowledge: symmetrical geometric forms constructed upon Pythagorean proportions, in which color is not an expressive choice but the consequence of harmonic calculation. Not decoration, not symbol: an architecture of vibration. Each mandala is the chromatic translation of a precise structure, of its own unique frequency.
Yet painting, as we know, cannot be confined within a system for long. And Di Fabio knows this well. His transition to oil painting, which began in Rome in 1996, marks the moment when knowledge becomes gesture, when calculation dissolves into movement. His canvases are not diagrams: they are fields of force. Within the dreamlike landscapes he creates, resonances and their harmonics emerge — not as visible structures, but as something perceived before it is understood, something that acts upon the viewer before the viewer even knows what they are looking at.
The concept that Di Fabio calls Harmonic Dynamism is precisely this: not equilibrium as stillness, but equilibrium as a permanent tension between opposing forces. The canvas becomes the place where instinctive gesture and conscious construction contend for space, without either ever definitively prevailing. Rhythm lies in the lines of force, in the most physical dimension of the painting. Melody resides in the chromatic contrasts, determined by consonant intervals as in a musical score. Harmony exists in the superimposition of colors, in their simultaneity: the moment in which multiple frequencies sound together and generate something that none of them contains on its own.
To look at a work by Di Fabio requires time — and movement. From a distance, the painting presents itself as a landscape: dreamlike, vibrant, traversed by energies that seem to emerge from within the canvas itself. Up close, the surface reveals itself as a stratification of decisions, overlapping gestures, and chromatic relationships constructed with the same logic by which a composer arranges the voices of a chord. There is no contradiction between these two levels of interpretation: both are necessary, as in every work that has something real to say.
Di Fabio seeks — and often finds — the moment in which painting ceases to represent and begins to resonate.
Germana D’Aloisio
Biography
Nunzio Di Fabio (1967) studied in Bologna, where he graduated in Political Science. He began his artistic research in the 1990s, developing it between Rome and Latin America. He has exhibited in public and institutional venues in Italy and abroad, including the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome. He currently lives and works in Abruzzo, Italy.
GALLERIA ORIZZONTI ARTE CONTEMPORANEA
Piazzetta Cattedrale (old town) – 72017 Ostuni (BR)
Tel. 0831.335373 – Cell. 348.8032506
info@orizzontiarte.it – www.orizzontiarte.it