“All my life has always been deeply bound to the Sea…The sea has always taken care of me since I can remember, and I feel its call. My psycho-physical system feels affected by its absence,” says Fabio Fontana, founder of Gos Lab. Fabio lives in Anzio, a small town South of Rome which faces the Mediterranean Sea. He continues; “I love crafting, all those single, slow, skilled acts, the preciosity of details which lies in these two techniques. I have always been seduced by the printing techniques of the past, particularly by monochrome and ink”.
Gos Lab is Fabio’s Surfing Concept Studio where the concepts of “artist” and “waterman” intermingle, giving life to limited productions of handmade prints that stand out from common commercial serial and digital production rules, creating the illusion of going back in time.
Gos Lab stands for “green ocean surfing laboratory”, and is run by Fabio in order to make and return something to the sea and nature through an art and surf philosophy. “In surfing, there is a deep feeling which can help pave the way for a strong link with nature. Surfing is much more than a common sports activity. It is like a weave, like a net, woven with the threads of deep interrelationship.” Surfing is Fabio’s joining link with Mother Nature. Rowing offshore, often lonely, looking at the land from a different point of view, provides him the opportunity to reflect and breathe. These moments not only allow Fabio to connect with himself, but are also a way for him to see first-hand how horribly man has been treating our planet. “If you are in the middle of the sea and you are surrounded by plastic bottles, shoppers, and mote, and not fish, this means that something has gone wrong. As an artist and a surfer I can’t ignore all this. I don’t have the arrogance to change people’s way of living, but, in my small way, I try to shift focus on some issues I consider important: the respect of nature, of the sea and of the creatures that live in.”
Xylography is the first printing technique that Fabio experimented with back in 2013 whilst starting up Gos Lab. He made his first stamp carvings with gouges directly on the lime wood matrix. However, wanting to reflect his passion for environmental well-being, he revised his building of woodcut blocks and instead recycled wood recovered from old boats that he found on the beach. First, Fabio draws his graphic images on paper, and then transfers them onto wood, carrying on the intaglios of the different items that will make up the block.
In his current creative research, the creation of the cyanotype illustrations represents the most meditative part of Fabio’s work. He uses a technique which finds its roots in the Australian aboriginals’ ancestral dot art. “I have reinterpreted their art, giving to my cyan works their own particularity and uniqueness,” describes the printmaker. This series of illustrations are made of thousands of micro spheres that vary in size on the basis of the visual rhythm he wants to convey in the drawing. “For me, they are like drops of water, which together form an image. Here, too, there is a strong conceptual component. We know for sure that water is a substance at the origin of creation, we ourselves are made of water for the 70/80% and so is our planet – the Earth. Isn’t it incredible?”
Amongst Fabio’s plans for the future is an intention to make Gos Lab materially itinerant and less dependent on a fixed physical place; “a small house-lab that I could move running after the waves”. He hopes to continue to combine has passion for the sea, environmental issues, and printmaking and raise more awareness through collaborations.
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