Fabrice de Nola

Fabrice de Nola
Fabrice de Nola, Self-portrait in negative, 1999 (oil on canvas, reproduction on negative film).
Born	1964 (1964) Messina, Italy
Nationality	Italian-Belgian
Known for	Conceptual art, painting, photography

Fabrice de Nola is an Italian-Belgian artist born in Messina (Sicily) in 1964. He introduced the use of QR codes in oil paintings. In 2006, he created the first oil paintings containing texts and web connections to be used on mobile phones.

The son of an Italian mother and a Belgian father, Fabrice de Nola lived in Messina until 1981. He attended the Art school in Palermo, but left after one year in order to pursue his interest in photography. At the end of the 1980s he moved to Milan, and thereafter to Mechelen, his father’s hometown.

In the mid-1980s he worked as a scene-painter in Geneva, Cairo and Rome. In those early years, he used and photography as techniques in support of his painting. In the mid-1990s, the computer became an essential tool for the preparation and pre-production of his paintings.

In 1996, he showed at the Il Ponte Contemporanea Gallery in Rome where he remained until the year 2000.

In 1997, Fabio Sargentini invited Fabrice de Nola to the Palermo exhibition Giro d’Italia dell’Arte curated by Demetrio Paparoni, a survey of young Italian artists, at the l’Attico Gallery. That same year he participated in Roma, 4 young painters, which showed four Roman painters and was curated by Fabio Sargentini at the Generous Miracles Gallery in New York.

In 1999, during the 48th Biennal of Venice, he exhibited in Authoritratti italiani at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa. Posters were put up at that time in Venice reproducing his works. De Nola painted a self-portrait using photographs, CT and X-rays: painted on one half is his face, while on the other half the interior is visible, showing skull, muscles, eyeball and brain.