“I’m attracted to unstable forms which resist interpretation. I’m inspired by poets (Gertrude Stein, John Ashberry, Bill Berkson) who dismantle syntax and treat language itself as their subject.”1
The Jancar Jones Gallery is a tiny jewel box located up the rear stairs of an office building in San Francisco’s SOMA district. Its current exhibition, Mirror 5, features the work of artist Bruno Fazzolari. In the middle of the gallery, a handcrafted bottle of eau de toilette marked with the number five sits waist-high atop a mirror on a pedestal. The mirror reflects the bottle, four minimalist paintings, and the remaining space of the gallery. The bottle brings to mind the world’s most famous fragrance, Chanel No. 5.
Coco Chanel invented her perfume during the jazz age, when the luxury of perfume was cheaper than a dress. She said, “I want to give the world something artificial, like a dress — something that has been made — I want a perfume that is a composition.”2
While the paintings look improvisational, they are in fact very deliberate works, carefully constructed from hundreds of Fazzolari’s black-and-white ink drawings. His personal system of signs and symbols are ambiguous, and a mark can stand for “a blade of grass or a tuft of hair, or appear purely (factually — resolutely) abstract.” According to Fazzolari, the colors in his paintings can function like “high notes” in a perfume, such as citrus or ginger.3
Fazzolari’s works have a performative aspect. Working wet into wet, he must complete each painting in one step. Each piece is composed by a combination of chance and carefully aligned parameters, reminiscent of the chance sound and visual experiments of John Cage. While Fazzolari’s marks are not musical, they function much like Cage’s: “like a syllabary, a graphic system whose components can be freely arranged to generate patterns of coherence,” creating unified but random beauty in the resulting surfaces like the latticework of snowflakes.4
