Neurone marino
At Casa Di Marino, the cycle of projects that began with Isadora Neves Marques’ Love in the Paleolithic continues to explore the domestic sphere as a space for experimentation and research, where the artwork encounters everyday life before entering the conventions of exhibition display. With Alberto Di Fabio, this dialogue takes on a permanent dimension. Installed on the terrace wall, the artist’s mosaic gives both its name and its point of departure to the project, Neurone marino.
Mosaic has been an important part of Di Fabio’s practice for many years and has featured in significant institutional contexts, including the work donated to the city of L’Aquila on the occasion of Panorama 2023 and a work from the artist’s practice held in the collection of Museo Madre in Naples. Rather than being composed of regular tesserae, Di Fabio’s mosaic is made from stones, minerals and found fragments collected along the coast. As they come together, the materials form a branching structure reminiscent of a nervous system, emerging somewhere between raw matter and the mental image it begins to suggest. The title Neurone marino comes precisely from this convergence between material and form, between what is physically present and what gradually becomes visible to the eye.
Alongside the mosaic, five large-scale works on paper introduce new figurations into the physical and mental landscapes that have long shaped Di Fabio’s research. Mountain ranges, neural systems, acid and fluorescent colours, the Higgs boson and the vast geographies of astrophysics all enter into a fluid visual language. These works mark a further development in his practice, in which landscapes begin to behave like matter in deep space or within the subatomic realm. They explode, contract, expand and gradually lose the contours they once possessed. Their surfaces are animated by the same tension found in the mosaic, constantly moving between what can be seen and what can only be imagined.
In 1942, Werner Heisenberg observed that the laws of nature alone are not sufficient to determine everything that happens in space and time, leaving part of what occurs to chance. It is within this space between certainty and possibility that Di Fabio’s work seems to move, giving provisional form to what remains beyond our field of vision while continuing to exert its effects.
The project is also rooted in a friendship that has lasted for more than twenty years. Every exhibition and collaboration carries with it everything that exists around the work, including shared experiences, encounters and fragments of everyday life. To place a permanent work within the home is to shift that accumulated memory from the realm of narrative into something physically and continuously present.
At Casa Di Marino, Di Fabio’s work becomes both an homage to Naples and a tribute to friendship. It reflects an idea of art capable of bringing together, on the same wall, the scale of a neuron and that of a galaxy.
The following are notes on works produced over the past few years, written directly by the artist:
Quantum Fields
Over the past three years, I have often returned to Abruzzo, where I was born, to organise the archive of my father Pasquale Di Fabio’s work and to prepare an exhibition dedicated to him alongside a solo presentation of my own work. More recently, I painted a wall painting in L’Aquila, at the foot of Gran Sasso. Once again, my mountains seemed to speak to me, opening up new ways of seeing and helping me to recognise other forms of matter. This latest series continues my investigation into the landscapes of the mind, into what we see and what remains invisible, or perhaps into a future landscape shaped and transformed by our own poisons. Painted in vivid colours, these works on paper become quantum fields, fragments of a cosmic landscape composed of invisible matter. Colour and pictorial matter appear increasingly elusive, fluid and transparent, allowing the viewer’s mind to imagine a possible connection with astral matter. Physical states seem to move towards the liquid and gaseous, suggesting a process of transformation and elevation, almost as if matter itself could become a vehicle for the soul. Moving between art, science and spirituality, the vortices and countless chromatic veils that unfold across these landscapes suggest different frequencies and forms of perception. They evoke eruptions of something intangible and lead towards an oneiric journey through parallel worlds, distant in space and time yet somehow closer to the quantum essence of the universe. The paintings gesture towards a landscape made of invisible matter, towards visions that human perception alone can never fully apprehend.
Ora et labora
For several years, I have worked with artistic techniques based on repetition, manual practice and the concentration of the mind, particularly through tapestry and mosaic. These new marine mosaics emerged during moments of meditation and prayer in front of the sea, often at sunset. In those moments, my hands instinctively gather the stones that attract me, and I begin to establish a direct connection between matter and the mind. The works originate in the moment when our synapses seem to perceive the infinite, suggesting a way of approaching an invisible world that has always existed before us. This can become a form of visual trance in which our sense of individual consciousness gradually recedes, allowing art and the mind to move towards a possible connection with the astral substance of matter. The idea of making mosaics has always been close to me. I have long been fascinated by the beauty and mathematical structure of Roman mosaics and, later, by the Romano-Byzantine mosaics of Ravenna, particularly those in the Basilica of San Vitale and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, as well as by mosaic practices that continued into the early twentieth century. For me, making a mosaic is a form of prayer directed towards parallel realities that seem closer to the spiritual dimension of human existence. The accumulation of stone tesserae, with their different colours and shapes, creates visions that can appear almost paradisiacal to the eye. The endless geometric arrangements of the stones generate what I experience as a form of quantum energy, leading towards the intuition of a universal God. Technique, science and spirituality come together through a process of complete concentration, opening a space in which it becomes possible to dream and to look at the world through the eyes of the soul.
Alberto Di Fabio, 2026