Fabio Giampietro

di Ivan Quaroni

He is considered one of the Italian pioneers of crypto art, but he comes from traditional painting like other NFT artists. Fabio Giampietro, born in Milan in 1974, has painted for years immense megalopolises seen from above, proliferating urban organisms that seem to have come out of the dystopian fantasies of a novel by Neal Stephenson, the inventor of the term metaverse. His paintings are rooted in the tradition of Futurism and Italian Aeropittura of the first post-war period and spatialist research, but his passion for technology has characterized his artistic investigation for over a decade. Most of his paintings are inspired by New York, the first model of a futuristic city that the new Asian megalopolises would later supplant. His is a metropolis seen from above, almost from a bird's eye view, on which the dizzying foreshortening of the urban network opens up. It is no coincidence that Giampietro calls these works "Vertigini," referring to the frightening disorientation generated by the height of the skyscrapers. A sensation that, among the first in Italy, he managed to transfer into VR with the installation "Hyperplanes of Simultaneity," which won the prestigious Lumen Prize, the most important award in the field of artworks created with technological means. Giampietro's crypto works are all derived from large oil paintings and, therefore, intentionally preserve the original pictorial grain of the image.