Three of the more than thousand frames produced by the interactive, self-generating software.

Mario Taddei’s work for Fabbri is a multimedia creation for which he himself produced the interactive, self-generating software. A passionate student of the writings of Leonardo da Vinci, his discoveries with regard to that artist’s machines have received worldwide attention. However, at the same time Taddei also works in digital art, collaborating in the 3-D Modelling,Cad/Cam and Multimedia Communication courses at the Milan Politecnico and dedicating a large part of his time to the development of interactive products for the teaching of science. For Fabbri he has produced virtual jars, like a sort of virus or alien that cannot be destroyed but rather constantly transforms itself. His work is perhaps a metaphor for the strength of the Bologna company, which has triumphantly moved into its second century and shows no sign of ageing 

The decisive feature in the work of this Lombard artist has always been the relation between word and image. But this work for Fabbri does not become comprehensible in the moment you read the title. 

What has Tim Burton got to do with Fabbri Amarena sweets? The fifty-year-old American actor and film director, famous for his visionary films of neo-gothic setting, is one of the artist’s favourite film-makers: like him, she feels close to the characters she paints, characters that are on the margins of— or in open conflict with —society.
Roberta Savelli, too, tends to interiorise everything; she is solitary and at times disconnected from the world. However, her starting-point is always that real world. Her paintings are oil portraits done on gauze, with the result that the form has a certain impalpable quality; the lightweight white surface makes her images seem to vibrate in the air. A year ago Roberta Savelli went back to drawing on paper, returning to the set design where she first trained or exploring the possibilities of book illustration, a field that has always tempted her. Her works tend to depict a middle land inhabited by ageless children, by young girls who do not want to grow up and by jars of Amarena sweets hidden away within a wonderland.

In her 2003 Concerning her life I, Luisa Raffaelli first introduced us to this image, which is now “revisited” – with the (almost) obvious addition of the blue and-white Fabbri jar at the centre of the table. 
At the end of the dining hall, however, one sees a young man staring at us from a monitor, his gaze passing through first the Fabbri jar, then the red-haired woman and finally us, beyond the image. For years now the Turin artist has used depictions of young metropolitan women as the leitmotif in hyperrealist images which deliberately wrong-foot the spectator; and here she does so again. Whether red-heads or blondes, Luisa Raffaelli’s women do not seem to impinge on space; they are bound neither by time nor gravity as they would be in reality. Instead, they are rather like extraterrestrials or the replicants of Blade Runner.
Whether digitally modified or not, they remain unknown beings, objects of desire; they are expressions of an alien state where fear debilitates everyday existence.

The Fabbri jar has almost disappeared, swallowed up by the brambles and branches of a wood in which one also sees a small human (or humanoid) figure, standing on the lid of the jar. 

Is this some sort of human-amarena genetic mutation? From the very beginning of his career, the young Sicilian artist Marco Prestia has produced futuristic, cybernetic images that denounce the malaise of our society, the falsity of the contemporary world.
Using resins and clays he models small figures, small jokes of destiny that have to feed on mummies; that have bellies which open up to release little butterflies. His most recent work has focused on biomorphism, with anthropomorphic figures that seem to come from fairytales. Half-human and half-animal, these exist within a undefined yet genetically very different world, or else they move within landscapes where the blades of grass and other small details make it clear that this is our world; that it could be our own garden or local park. This is when the human variable in these mutations makes itself felt most powerfully, instilling within us the doubt that perhaps such things really do exist.

A leading figure in the New Roman School, Gioacchino Pontrelli gives each one of his works contemporary immediacy; it is clear and comprehensible to one and all. At the same time, however, his pictures — which contain design furnishings in opulent or minimalist interiors where there is never a single human presence — say something which will only be perceived by those who truly know how to look. The artist has developed a very individual poetics to express his own inner search. Known as the “one who does interiors,” he is aware that his works speak directly only to a few people, and yet this does not disturb him. Each work recounts a state of feeling, choosing a precise setting for its narrative. Amarené, for example, is set in a 1950s house, as one can see from certain clues: the fine black-cherry Fabbri jar, the famous Arne Jacobsen chair, colourful abstract pattern of the carpet. However, Gioacchino Pontrelli sets down no precise intention, offers no precise answers.
The observer is welcome to lose himself within the world of the canvas or simply appreciate its formal beauty.

The blue-and-white drawers of this little “zombie” are clearly inspired by the colours of the Fabbri jar. The figure looks at the spectator as she plunges her arms deep into a white mix that is even bigger than she is. Is it candied sugar? The sensual red lips, printed like a sort of signature in the lower corner of the composition, seem to smack with contentment. What has happened to Elena Monzo’s female figures, which were so aggressive and transgressive, so determinedly searching for their own individuality? Here, the young Brescian artist draws using pencil; she applies glued sequins; employs a language that has the immediacy of cartoon art. However, there is also the coarseness of finish we associate with a certain type of Expressionism.
The acid colours and malleable forms show that Elena Monzo is not trying to describe a tangible reality but rather to achieve a psychological/emotional transformation of the visible. She invents a new type of perspective in which proportions are not realistic; colours are inspired by mood and the forms are deliberately off-kilter. Spatio-temporal reality has been replaced by emotions.

Mido started in the field of street art (“once you’ve been a ‘writer,’ you are one all your life, even if you stop wall painting”, he says) and now works in the field of design. In the career of this second-generation Italian artist, however, some things have not changed: a passion for drawing and the need to keep a photographic record of what he encounters and loves. This is particularly true with regard to his land of origin and to his numerous travels elsewhere, during which hundreds of photographs have helped to refined a noteworthy talent. For Fabbri, he has created a digital photo in which a domestic scene is transfigured into art. To the young female explorer who is the main figure in the picture, the Fabbri jar becomes a cross between an Aladdin’s lamp and the means to a “close encounter of the third kind.” There it is, an “unidentified object” which is a rich source of dazzling emotions and brightly-coloured sweet surprises.

The work by the Tuscan artist is a modern-day vanitas, created using the blue-and-white majolica of the Fabbri jar; in effect, Paolo Maione here “updates” a work he previously created in 2007. Bizarre and non-conformist, an expert invisual puns and paradoxes, this is a sculptor who works in a range of materials (majolica, bronze, terracotta) and is a fervent advocate of the essential importance of the relationship between the artist and the material he is working with and in. Of great technical skill, Maione’s art draws upon ideas and forms that mix together popular vernacular and the most noble traditions of the decorative arts. His wry humour is itself a part of a long Italian tradition that includes such figures as Collodi (he has done a memorable cycle of works dedicated to the mocking, anarchic spirit of Pinocchio), Pirandello, De Filipppo and Totò — all masters of humour but also philosophers of disenchantment.

Large, rounded, and gentle in form, the Fabbri Amarena jar floats like a reassuring buoy. In this painting by Luca Giovagnoli, it is like a maternal figure in a black bathing costume, an image that has all the freshness of a snapshot rediscovered in a family album. The result is a surreal vision rendered with the painterly skillof yesteryear. Twenty years on into his career, this Rimini-born artist still takes great pleasure in constructing his pictorial supports himself, applying meticulous skill to the process. The hemp is drawn across thin canvas and then covered with a generous layer of size to smooth out the natural unevenness in the surface. Giovagnoli does not make preparatory sketches because it is his state of mind at the time which suggests his palette.
Hence the acrylics are mixed with earth, sand and natural powders to create a granulated impasto that can be scratched and scraped; can be poured or lightly dripped onto the canvas. The whole appears to be entirely casual and yet each move is carefully studied to add to the overall harmony of the end result. The technique is quick, fluid and dynamic as the painting must never be allowed to dry, nor the size to set; matter must remain soft and ductile. The artist paints following a recipe that he feels in his blood; innate awareness plays the same sort of role as it does in Fabbri’s creation of their Amarena.

An artist at home in a wide range of fields—painting, sculpture, decorative arts—Eloisa Gobbo has in recent years achieved a very important maturity of style and expression. The results are works that wrong-foot and intrigue—just like this jar overflowing with Fabbri Amarena which is in fact a bearer of light, a lamp. Further ambiguity comes from the fact that this object is made of sintered nylon and yet appears to be terracotta. Such play on sense and sense perception is a distinctive feature of the Padua artist’s work. Like all authentic artists, she produces art that is open-ended, which can be interpreted at various levels.
For Eloisa Gobbo, decoration is an instrument, a de-structured alphabet which, through stylistic variation, she can re-arrange to form new patchworks of images. However, the artist is not content to remain at the surface of things. Her work reflects upon the social and political issue of prostitution, upon the existential problems caused when sex becomes dissociated from love. To express her thoughts on these matters, the artist draws upon the iconology of the ornamental arts in both the East and the West, then applying graphic design and computer graphics in a way that produces a very individual synthesis of form.

He is good at gorillas. He has been painting them since 2002, when he created the first series of animal paintings that would then figure in the 2008 exhibition “Safari.” 

For Riccardo Gavazzi, however, the animals are a pretext for the exploration of form; the variety in their bodies fascinates him, with their form allowing for greater freedom of expression and experimentation than he would find in human portraiture.
In animals Gavazzi sees matter and colour; envisages the challenge of taking the brutal and making it desirable. He chooses painting here because it, too, is a primitive gesture —like cooking; it is life itself. In painting this giant ape — which naturally calls up memories of King Kong — the artist experiences the sense of velocity and power in his own body; he establishes a carnal, human, relation with the space around him. The result is a sort of script in which the story of the work becomes the work itself. In this picture for Fabbri, the company logo forms part of a Pop background while the blond Ann Darrow is replaced by the white-and-blue jar typical of Amarena sweets. The result is a particularly felicitous blend of cinematic and pictorial action.

A master who has played a role in Italian painting since the late post-war period, Walter Fusi would develop what are still the characteristics of his own unmistakable style in the early 1980s, when he moved back to his native Val d’Elsa (Tuscany), where he still lives and works. Actually born in Udine to Tuscan parents, Fusi would move to Florence whilst still in his youth, the Arte Informale of the 40s-50s determining his vocation as an artist. From this movement, Fusi would move to Geometric Abstractionism and then – having moved to Milan – would in the 60s-70s become part of Concretism.
Returning to Florence in the early 80s, he would however return to Arte Informale and Abstractionism, producing mixed media canvases distinguished by their flat fields of colour. It would be impossible to expect him to include a foreign body such as an Amarena jar in his rigorously geometrical compositions. And in this work for Fabbri, that jar becomes broken into pieces, into flat outlines and elements of blue, in accordance with the deconstructionism that is a familiar feature of Fusi’s art.

Amid banks of snow and behind a mountain refuge of stones and timber, a tin of Fabbri Amarena emerges into view near a number of bare trees and the ramparts of a military fort.

The Abruzzo-born artist Francesca Forcella favours a style that is both simple and immediate. Small or medium-sized, her canvases depict mountain landscapes and valleys covered in snow. In these paintings, the silent covering becomes a sort of padding that absorbs some of the visual reality. These calm backgrounds are the setting for images that are suspended in time and space. There is no human presence, but — as in this picture — there are traces of human existence and civilisation. The setting created by the artist invites the spectator to enter and explore an unspoilt landscape, with the Amarena jar serving as the fuse that ignites one’s imagination.

An outsize tin container and a colour that has nothing to do with those one might expect (neither the red amarena colour of the sweet itself nor the blue and white of its famous jar). So where is the evocation of the Fabbri trademark? In the decorative motif. Applied by hand like a sort of transfer, this is used with such extreme minimalism that it serves to hint (but no more) at something familiar. China Black is far from being typical of Flavio Favelli’s work. It belongs to a new stage in the career of the Florentine artist, with him no longer forming assemblages of the tasteless things he encountered as a child in the bourgeois homes of his relatives. Made up of abandoned objects, hisoriginal installations had striven toevoke memories of the recent pastvia the things which had “inhabited”that past: his grandmother’s bottles of vermouth; the coloured tissuepaperwrappers of Sicilian oranges; old wrought iron gates; junkshopfurniture; ceramic Fabbri jars. Now,these installations are becoming morestylised and simplified. From anintimate personal analysis of his ownexistence, Favelli is passing on to amore political exploration of thecollective world of trademarks, thenew “patrons” of the contemporary.Re-interpreted by the artist the mass-produced Fabbri jars thusgenerate authentic fakes which playupon both the recognition andmisinterpretation of the artistic sign(that is, the identity of the artist).

A provocative performance artist, Sabine Delafon’s work is closer to the Fluxus movement than to the ideas of Conceptualism. In each piece there is a focus on selfdepiction and an almost obsessive resort to repetition (be it of the image itself or of the very gesture of artistic creation). Here she has chosen an installation with thirty-two Fabbri glass jars. Aligned in four rows, these do not however contain the famous sweets but rather a number of photographs that suggest their good taste, colour and trade mark, or else various personal recollections of the French artist herself. Decontextualised in this manner, the Fabbri jar is lifted from the world of the confectioner’s art and establishes its place in the world of the visual arts.

As seen by the Roman painter Marco Colazzo, the blue-and-white jar of Fabbri Amarena becomes a cosmos in its own right. Hence this small robot fixing its sights on the (unknown or desired?) object; hence the ten moons revolving around this creature within a Martian sky. In effect, the artist uses painting to create a habitat where life and dream intersect, one producing the consequences of the other. Geometrical abstraction is a powerful component of works which over the years have veered towards Concretism and Surrealism without ever losing their internal coherence. Colazzo uses puppet or robots as the best way of combining everything within a single figure; however he never paints a real person (perhaps out of sense of delicacy). Once again, the characters in the picture are unnamed and unidentified, leaving the stage entirely to the Fabbri logo.

A premonitory dream or a nightmare? Something real is happening in this samurai’s calm afternoon: his geisha is doing a live copy of a jar of Fabbri Amarena onto an ancient seal and, for a moment, the warrior is no longer the centre of the universe. Perhaps his woman is about to betray him with the famous Bolognese sweet… if only in thought.

Since 2007 Roberto Coda Zabetta has produced black-and-white canvases in which the deformed rendition of the human face is the defining feature. These unmistakable works render his vision of a world which the Biella-born artist refers to as “The East”: Japan, Tibet, China, Indonesia. His relationship with this “East” has become even closer over the last two years, with exhibitions of work in Bali, Beijing, Shanghai and Jakarta, and this work for Fabbri is yet further proof of his turn towards a more exotic narrative form of pictorial art.

Born into a Savona family of artists— his father, Achille, was a painter of the Socialismo Reale school— Vincenzo Cabiati is best known as a ceramicist and sculptor; however he also produces work that mixes together a number of different media: photography, video, ceramics, bronze, wax, installation art, etc. 

His piece for Fabbri once again expresses his individual pictorial vision, influenced by his range of experience in media from photography to painting. The underlying principle is that of a transposition of the real, which is here re-presented to the spectator in a number of original visions. In Oasi a man whom the artist knows very well (his alter ego?) is portrayed in shirt and jacket whilst he seems to have nodded off in a comfortable corner of the house amidst a number of old paintings. Encapsulating a somnolent interval prior to an awaited event, this is an image important not because of its origin but because of the way Cabiati re-works it. The artist seems to interiorise the vision before reproducing it, then re-presenting it via the filter of various memories, feelings and evocations. He alludes but does not explain, suggests rather than makes manifest. Here the world of Fabbri becomes a subtle decorative motif, legible through the transparency of the plexiglas.

In the famous novel "À la recherche du temps perdu", the taste of a madeleine re-awakens memories of childhood in the mind of Marcel Proust.
Similarly, the Fabbri vase causes the sweetest moments of her past to re-emerge in the art of Adriana Albertini; this is the past that will never leave her, even if its presence has now become intermittent. Such is the idea behind her luminous installation Sweet Explosion / Dolce Esplosione. Made in ceramic, this is a mosaic of fragments of lived experience which never fade with the passing of time.

A ceramicist and designer, the Brescia artist has here handpainted the fragments of the famous Fabbri jar to then fire them in an oven with Amarena sweets themselves (more than 200 in all); the pieces are then hung on thin threads of wire so that they jingle together in the breeze. The work is thus a “triumph” of lightness. A luminous explosion of intoxicating sensations, it takes one back in time, accompanying one’s journey with an enchanting music that might almost be described as a hymn to sweetness and to cherry red love.