On the occasion of the inauguration of the solo exhibition of the artist Bra, the critic Philippe Daverio will be present at the Cavour gallery in Padua on Saturday 17 June from 18.30.

Here's how the well-known art historian defines the painter's work:

The particular case of the pictorial works and drawings of Fabio Brasiliani has been anticipated by critics since 1886 when the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson published in London Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was based on a science fiction hypothesis which was corroborated by a series of parallel investigations that the curiosity of fin-de-siècle European culture was undertaking. Stevenson didn't know it but he was following a path similar to that which Dr. Sigmund Freud was pursuing in the same years in Vienna. Since then it has been known that the psyche generates contemporary and different languages, which however contain the same conflicting secrets of the personality.

Fabio Brasiliani is from this point of view an intriguing example of an artistic laboratory. It is because it begins its adventure starting from a given character that much of contemporary art seems to want to repress as too discriminatory. His starting point is that of a natural talent in thinking up unexpected images and in possessing an adequate and out of the ordinary pictorial "dexterity" to execute these images. Drawing is for him immediate and never suffered. The composition of the images is equally immediate and without hardships. So here he flies with ease in the inventions of a long career as an "illustrator" for the world of advertising. Here he is equally happy in making large pencil drawings that surprise for their unhesitating skill. This is the official and professional phase of serious Dr. Jekyll.

Mr Hyde is the other unsuspected face of his visionary character. And it is that of painting. We know that painting is matter while drawing is form. We know that the two practices run on cross tracks. But from there to foresee the vigor that painting takes after having seen the polite and ironic attention of the illustrative works, those designed as well as those composed with the digital mechanics of electronics, the road is completely unexpected. And it surprises. It is surprising in that the sense of liberation that is stimulated by the pictorial gesture, by the charge it gives to the material, to the spot of color, appears immediate. If the drawing tells the story, the painting lives. If drawing is skill, painting is passion.