The canvas is painted in real time: in an anonymous bathtub, Serena plunges in the water and she is clothed. She does not hold in her hand a bath foam bottle but a bottle of Amarena Fabbri and is about to pour a few precious drops that tone the entire composition to a beautiful old rose. A few cherries navigate underwater. The atmosphere is attractive like an advertising poster and suspended at the same time, as if in a metaphysical picture. The pop aesthetics, mediated by American Alex Katz (New York, 1927), is strengthened by the bottle’s precise detail but the color is not spread by flat paintings of the background and Zaffino knows well the shadows and nuisances of the story told. In this work, the main character is not a special out-of-the-ordinary event but the moment that precedes it. The young painter from Genoa is capable of materializing the waiting and our eyes light up.

Rather hermetic is the diptych imagined by the young photographer from the Puglia region to wish a good day. The allusion to the cherry is delicate, naturally spread on toasted bread. The two boys who seem siblings have different characters but both appear distant, bored and alone. The background behind them and the solid-wood table in the foreground make them direct heirs of Leonardo’s twelve apostles invited to the table of a last dinner with no guest of honor. Vinci masterly interprets the decline of European civilization which is no longer able to give to its children a good reason for living.

The fascination is strong and a scent of middle-east spices and harems emanates from the installation of Adriano Tetti for Fabbri. Like in other works of his, the title lends a sense to the work, in which the pit-thrower profile has the same dignity as a Renaissance portrait, while the white-and-blue decorated cap of Amarena Fabbri takes the place of Sufi dancers. In the blue wood support even the trajectory of projected pits with elegant precision creates a celestial course and a pleasant night effect: Tetti’s combined painting for Fabbri moves from Rauschenberg and arrives to the advertising posters that announce “never-seen-before turns” of Moira Orfei’s equestrian circus.

A fine painter of the human and animal body, Samorì has chosen for Fabbri a female profile with vague Ethiopian traits and Eva’s ancient beauty, the mother of all living beings. It does that diluting tamarind juices and cherry syrups to create together with resins and inks a red color like sinopias and the most ancient rupestrian paintings. The pigment is spread by washes on antiqued paper then applied on a canvas, it is a medium between the alpha and omega of time, through which the artist, with a shamanic gesture, exercises memory and transmits a glimpse of truth, fragile like the impalpable depth of the heart

The beauty of this art work lies in the ambiguous force that it gives out, generating a happy short circuit on the formal and symbolic plane. Is the red dripping down the jaws of the dragon blood or cherry juice? And is his clumsy landing with outspread wings on the prey a victory (the vase has broken) or a defeat (the dragon was injured)? The answer lies in the pop culture of this young ceramic artist, second prize winner at the 55th international competition of 2007 Faenza Prize. His global fantasy vision makes us dream of Eragon mounting the Saphira blue dragon, rather than Michael the archangel. His dragon, craving for syrup, looks east- rather than westward, thus becoming an auspicious symbol of fertility and good luck, like in China and Japan where this legendary animal is painted on vases, embroidered on brocades, melted in the bronze pipes guarding the fountains and accompanied at least once a year by feasts and fire works. In Salvatory’s fairy-tale creature however we apparently sense a glimpse of moral: no enemy could have defeated it except goodness.

A genuine native of the Campania region, Ruggiero carries an indelible mark: the excruciating perception of reality as a contrast between life and death, as a struggle between light and darkness, as a destiny between Hell and Paradise. In this dilemma, he opts for Purgatory, that is, a middle ground that enters the night but heads for dawn, a human and temporary solution, just because one must pass through the evil and then leave it behind. In this way Pompei tragedy becomes the most beautiful natural museum of open-sky human moulds and Giovanni Ruggiero the inventor of its opposite, namely, the introrelief. Carving inward in the matter, he shows the interior of the sculpture itself. These are no negative matter carvings but sculptures obtained by directly subtracting matter from matter. With this human bust impression, carved into the white-and-bleu ceramic of the Fabbri vases, the artist reveals the matter we are made of. He tells us that the natural vacuum does not exist and that absence is yet but another face of presence. In between, the memory of each existence.

Loyal to the playful and provocative poetics that has made him world famous (in Indonesia he already has a couple of imitators) the Vicenza artist, master of computer art and first in Italy to create about ten years ago an artistic videogame, interprets the subject creating a lethal weapon with the white-and-blue majolica of the Fabbri vases. Putting matter and form on a collision course, Antonio Riello describes, with caustic irony, the inconsistencies and psychosis of our time.

For its evident cinema origin with a strong intimist glimpse and a peculiar use of light that winks at a child-like, playful and nostalgic landscape.

Two Oriental women each clutch an Amarena Fabbri vase to theirchests, as they watch each other while they blink at the door. They seemsymmetrical but they are not. Are we in front of a frame from a television commercial? Or are we inside a video-game? We are definitely at the beginning of another episode written by theimagination of Giuseppe Rado, the father of two potential icons from Japanese cartoons, Kaori and Shanty. The artist recreates the typical eyes of mangacomicsusing photographic retouching and brings his female characters into a real dimension. The two girlshave a literary touch, with looks andbehavior that revive the Orientalismof the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th century.However the poses in the style of Madame Butterfly and Turandotdo not become gestures, and the overpowering finale never comes.

The young artist from Faenza designs a sort of caloric whopper with an explosive taste: a three-body installation (the three Fabbri white-and-blue ceramic vases) in a trefoil decoration on a white plate whose detonator is the Fabbri cherry. The winner is the platinum preciosity that dips like blood. Neretti decorates the vase surface with tiny skulls that scare no one.

Amarena cherries like jewels and crystal wares that from the Fabbri vase throw a light cone onto the infinite time of cosmic space. In the one-color that resembles the vibration of the universe, Marcello Jori creates for Fabbri these tiny precious geometries, enchanted and kaleidoscopic. The experimenter of form, an artisan of matter, the artist has slowly forsaken the conceptual matrix to lend weight to the world. From the time of his participation in the 1982 Venice Biennial, Jori has created many sensible worlds, going from photography to painting, from vertical and fluctuating “writings” in his material and mental space to polychromatic facilities of puppet theatre, moving garish architectures and prelude to these finely elegant and harmonious low-relief.

The artistic gesture may be erotic only upon one condition: the hand giving pleasure must be the same as the hand that grasped it first. The cherry is small, our expectation is big, but the half-closed mouth of the woman does not feel like sweets and does not know what she desires. A black shadow swallows everything, in a play of murky contours that poses although thrusts not to the surface the deepest vital drives

For its wise and mock-classical factuality which goes back to historical elements with some ironic concession to modernism testifying to the existence of a bond with tradition that fears no innovative impulse.

A fragment of white marble, carvedwith letters and arabesques,immediately conjures up a mystery to be revealed, the key to whichmight be hidden in one of the pillarsof a medieval cathedral. Where willthe trace of Fabbri that can beglimpsed through the roughness of the marble carved by youngGalliani lead? It will not lead to Wiligelmo, nor to Antelami, his famous predecessors from the Emilia region, because the steelwire that comes out of the urn is as shiny as an enchanting snake’stongue and has a red cherry on itstip, which comes close to the formsof Philippe Starck. The contrastbetween the materials used createsan open work, capable of producingmultiple references. When faced with this precious object, the memoryof the ancient Comacine mastersimmediately gives way to that of themodern confectionery masters.

For the quality of his painting that with irony and wisdom grasps a sunny and bright image able to best represent the Italian character of the company.

As a master of the absurd, the artistinvents a surreal scene in which the Peso dolcemoves forward with nimbleness on a battered,staggering on an auto rickshaw as on a Sicilian cart, according to popular tradition, but almostpushed by a surreal wind which fills the Amarena Fabbri vase like a fore-and-aft sail. The realisticelement combines with a visionaryone, as the sight of the AmarenaFabbri vase hoisted up like a flag on top of the construction of fruitand vegetable crates makes yousmile. The viewer is disorientatedand amused and returns to achildlike state as he or she tries toreconstruct this highly imaginativedelirium in a logical way. The subjects of Di Marco’s paintingsare only seemingly modest and insignificant. In reality they bearthe incredibly strong symbolicimportance of human activity and the culture that it produces.

Aerial, playful, intelligent, educated, Cuoghi’s amarena cherry has been conceived like an extraterrestrial dew.

The fruit comes out plentiful from the headgear of the goddess Idea, just like the goddess Athena was born from Zeus’ forehead. Described as a “Pandora Fabbri” vase, the celestial appearance has been conceived like a devotional image of late Counter-Reformation, with the worshipper dressed like a flirt at the bottom and the saint in the heaven. It is painted suspended on the clouds like a Virgin of Brazilian Santeria, profiled with precise drawing like in an animated comics-strip and poses her hands into a solemn posture like a goddess of good taste of the Hindu pantheon. The canvas has attractive character and force, it is a fairy-tale presence to be savored with all senses.

In this play of symbolic quotes the cross references suggested by the young factory of Fabrice Coniglio and Andrea Raviola are really infinite: the homo faber (forerunner of all artists), the Ephesto’s arms-forging furnace (Volcano), the Masonry (the hammer is the tool of the Loggia master and the two watchmen), the cherry like a drop of divine blood and a ruby that possesses the virtues of all other precious stones, a metaphor of the philosopher’ s stone. Since they self-portrait themselves, imitating the well-known English Gilbert & Gorge pair, the Coniglio-Viola pair creates a parody work: virtual artisans of the digital medium are versatile representatives of contemporary meta-language in which every thing transliterates into a “stunt” (i.e., finds a place in the scene of contemporary relativism). For this reason they moveon the surface with swiftness andskill, but they do not go any deeper.As a result they are not familiar withthe flavor of experience, and in thistwo-dimensional representation,rather than the flavor of AmarenaFabbri, they evoke the Americanslaughterhouse inhabited by the serial killers of The TexasChainsaw Massacre.

What has Davide Coltro sighted? In a Po landscape, toned to yellow, a dozen unidentified objects fall from the sky.

It is not at all a foregone conclusion that these are stylized vases of Amarena Fabbri, but rather they are abstract, smooth and round forms like bells or spacecrafts, huge breasts or whirligigs immersed in a “medium color” created by the author. In fact we have been accustomed for long by this Verona artist to these minimal or serial views, characterized by countless numerical tones and by a color value extracted from the photographed reality. They are landscapes of the soul that encourage us to ponder the relationship between reality and virtual world, between nature and culture. The shots generating this work have a classical character and their peculiarity lies in the transformation of the original photographic image. Using the medium color which becomes a second and new skin to be applied to the skeleton of the image, Coltro shows us a cosmos beyond the canvas. First, he photographs and paints it. However, where does his vision come from? Does the artist see or dream? And if he sees, what fills his sky?

With his typical suspended lyricism, Matteo Bergamasco creates a shallow image to tell the century-long epic of the Fabbri company.

In dribs and drabs, he describes past and present things: bottles of citron-juice drink and ice-creams, Gran Senior brandy and syrups, a black-and-white ceramic liquor vase of the Fifties and white-and-blue Amarena vases, complimentary coffee sets in Richard-Ginori porcelain and the entire industrial processing of semi-finished products for pastry and ice-cream making which even today contributes to the international success of the brand. The painter needs no words, he catches the soul of the situation in the candor of an almost fairy-tale image to tell in a poetic conciseness the serenity of an industrious life