A premonitory dream or a nightmare? Something real is happening in this samurai’s calm afternoon: his geisha is doing a live copy of a jar of Fabbri Amarena onto an ancient seal and, for a moment, the warrior is no longer the centre of the universe. Perhaps his woman is about to betray him with the famous Bolognese sweet… if only in thought.
Since 2007 Roberto Coda Zabetta has produced black-and-white canvases in which the deformed rendition of the human face is the defining feature. These unmistakable works render his vision of a world which the Biella-born artist refers to as “The East”: Japan, Tibet, China, Indonesia. His relationship with this “East” has become even closer over the last two years, with exhibitions of work in Bali, Beijing, Shanghai and Jakarta, and this work for Fabbri is yet further proof of his turn towards a more exotic narrative form of pictorial art.