Dog of War

From the harshly stony structures of his land (Tuscany without idylls, the Tuscany of the morsel of earth snatched from the mountain) and from the sulphurous and provocative humours of his people, Agenore Fabbri derived the rough virulence of his plastic language, made of dense superimpositions of material ganglia, in sharp and pointed tangles of a glassy consistency, even when he models docile terracotta. The dramatic realism that charges all of Fabbri's works with piercing notes, even those apparently marked by the informal technique, is kindled by an exasperated defensive sensibility of modern man, threatened by a monstrous technicism. And yet, in the last analysis, Fabbri's combative reaction is not self-pitying or supinely fatalistic. The monster in which he concentrates his tremors may also be a catalysing fetish.