ROBERTO DEL FABBRO

Roberto Del Fabbro is an artist who gives new life to waste materials by transforming them into fish. Through the use of recycled materials, his works explore the profound connection between nature and sustainability, combining irony, color, and environmental reflection. Fish become symbols of rebirth: what was abandoned returns to swimming, charged with meaning and imagination. Roberto Del Fabbro develops an artistic research focused on the transformation of recycled materials, which become the building blocks of a powerful and symbolic fish imagery. Fish, a recurring subject in his work, emerge as archetypal and universal forms, evoking a reflection on the relationship between humanity, nature, and consumption. Through a material and layered language, the artist reworks waste and residue, restoring aesthetic dignity and narrative value. His works engage in a dialogue between sustainable practice and contemporary sensibility, where the artistic gesture becomes an act of Roberto Del Fabbro articulates his artistic research through a practice grounded in the reuse and reconfiguration of waste materials, engaging with the contemporary debate on sustainability and the ethics of artistic production. The recurring and structuring iconographic motif of the fish takes on a layered symbolic value: a cultural archetype, a liminal organism, and a metaphor for a fragile ecosystem, marked by human intervention. The recovered material, removed from the cycle of consumption and obsolescence, is reworked through assembly and painting processes that highlight its memory and previous function. In this sense, Del Fabbro's work is a critical device, capable of triggering a reflection on the relationship between form, material, and environmental responsibility, positioning itself at the intersection of ecologically conscious artistic practices and contemporary languages. Roberto Del Fabbro develops an artistic practice that interrogates matter in its historical, political, and ecological dimensions, through the reuse of waste materials removed from linear cycles of production and consumption. The fish, a central and recurring figure, emerges as a liminal subject: an organism immersed in a vulnerable ecosystem and, at the same time, a symbolic device capable of triggering a reflection on the relationship between living things, the environment, and human responsibility. The recovered material is neither neutralized nor camouflaged, but retains traces of its origin, making visible the stratification of the processes that have passed through it. In this sense, the work is situated within a perspective that recognizes matter's own agency, in which the artistic gesture takes the form of an act of negotiation between the human and the non-human. Del Fabbro's production thus presents itself as a field of tension between form and residue, image and remains, proposing a critical reinterpretation of the natural imagination in light of contemporary ecological emergencies. Roberto Del Fabbro develops an artistic practice that embraces matter as an epistemological field, questioning its conditions of existence within contemporary regimes of production, consumption, and waste. The use of recycled materials is not a merely ethical or formal choice, but rather a critical device through which to challenge the distinction between natural and artificial, between residue and resource. The fish, a persistent iconographic subject, operates as a liminal conceptual figure: an entity immersed in a compromised environment, a body traversed by ecological, economic, and symbolic flows, and at the same time a sign of a nature no longer conceivable as an uncontaminated otherness. And yet, despite the complexity of the context and the fragility of ecosystems, Del Fabbro's works convey a tangible and contagious joy: the capacity of matter to be reborn, of color to illuminate, of the creative gesture to transform waste into poetry. In this sense, his fish swim not only among the residues and memories of the world, but also toward a possible future, capable of reconciling aesthetics, ecology, and hope.