Fabio De Poli was born in Genoa in 1947 and enrolled at the Florence Istituto d’Arte in 1964 specialising in Advertising Graphics under the guidance of Lucio Venna. In 1968 he took part in and followed the main contemporary art events.
His début was in the late 1960s with a New Dada work entitled I gelidi teatrini di Fabio de Poli with texts by Giorgio Cortenova (I gelidi teatrini di Fabio de Poli, Studio d’Arte Oggetti, Bologna 1971) and then I ricordi londinesi with texts by Renato Barilli (I ricordi londinesi, Galleria Stivani, Bologna 1973).
In 1972 he won a Florence town council study bursary for young artists and also met Eugenio Miccini in this period, working with him on the Visual journal in 1977. This was also the period of Interventi su Picasso, Per ricordarti che sei un uomo, (1969); Pinelli e Salsedo (1971) for the Téchne journal, once again directed by Miccini.
In 1974 he began taking an interest in industrial design and for two years worked as Art Director for the Giovannetti firm designing two beds called Camel bed (see Industrial design produzione: Camel bed, in “Casabella”, XL, no. 410, febbraio 1976; M.C., Cammelli come un’oasi del deserto, in “Casa Vogue”, no. 47/48, luglio-agosto 1975) and Dog.
In the late 1970s his work diversified into more than one art sector. De Poli embraked on a wide range of experiences ranging from his participation in painting exhibitions (Arte Fiera ’78, Bologna, 1978; Ars Combinatoria, Bologna, 1979; XXXIX Biennale Nazionale d’Arte città di Milano, Milan, 1984; International Art Exposition, Miami Beach, 1991, 1992; Due atti unici, Florence, 1998), designing art books (in 1992, he took part in the Libro d’artista italiano exhibition organised by the New York Museum of Modern Art), videotape creation and publishing work (he illustrated the volume Scrittori al volo for Giunti Gruppo Editoriale and for Gruppo Editoriale Fiorentino, the cover for the book La sindrome di Stendhal). He curated the images for the Lega Italiana per la Lotta contro i Tumori’s anti-smoking campaign, for the Per non dimenticare Sarajevo and for Vasto Jazz (Regione Abruzzo). In 1999 he created his first virtual exhibition on the internet, The most beautiful art exhibition in the world.
Fabio De Poli’s work is to be found in public and private collections in Italy and abroad.
Mr. Smoke
Mr. Smoke depicts a face with a cigarette in its mouth. Its painterly language is rendered with flat brushstrokes in bright colours, a characteristic of Fabio De Poli’s work, in equilibrium with a structural research into form synthesised but fully recognisable in its figurative entity and hinging on a playful aesthetic spirit, a further feature of his style.
“De Poli can be easily encompassed within a trend which we might imperfectly call European Pop Art. There is nothing random about the fact that many of his subjects and certain details bring to mind artists such as English Joe Tilson, Spanish Edoardo Arroyo, Italian Valerio Adami and perhaps many other artists from the figurative scene from the 1960s onwards” (O. Calabresi, Fabio de Poli (exhibition catalogue), Livorno, Pontedera (Pisa), Edizioni Graphis Arte, 2000, p. 13).
It is a painting style made up of everyday icons, cheerful colours, apparently easy-to-use but constructed with their own cultural depth and nurtured by the artist’s awareness of and direct attention to the cultural and artistic developments of recent decades.