Fabio Viale: Acqua alta [High tide]

Italian artist Fabio Viale (Cuneo, 1975) comes back to Florence with “Acqua alta High tide”, a solo show running February 22 – May 16 2020 in Galleria Poggiali, after a series of successful exhibitions at Biennale di Venezia and Gipsoteca, Munich.
The exhibition is divided into different art spaces, in Via della Scala and Via Benedetta. The former include a group of scultures that the artist made for the 58th edition of Biennale di Venezia, Venice Pavillion. The sculptures include a dozen monoliths that recall the Venetial “bricole”, wooden poles used as signals for navigation. With these artworks, Viale aims at highlighting the climatic urgency that Venice went thought last November, and at emphasising the incontrollable progress of climate change that is overturning the equilibrium of nature.
The latter focuses instead on an artwork made with stone chippings and marble debris taken from the overhangs that collect the waste of quarry. Among the shapeless mass of rubble, the landscape reminds the visitors of the inevitable tragedy of nature that can reduce everything to dust.