The Smussato Technique: Origin and Creative Process of Michela Fabeni's Contemporary Bas-reliefs
- michelafabeni
- 13 hours ago
- 2 min read
My art was born in a moment of personal rebirth, when I was rediscovering myself without knowing what to expect from the present or the future. It was in that suspended time that I began exploring material on canvas. Everything started with a spontaneous gesture, from a physical need to touch, carve, and feel. I was not used to working on canvas — I had always loved expressing myself without boundaries on walls — but adapting to that limit opened a new possibility.
With patience, I began working the surface, observing each movement and listening to what happened beneath my hands. From this dialogue my technique emerged: Smussato — a process in which material is carved, shaped, and revealed through direct contact. Forms are not rigidly designed — they arise. Anthropomorphic figures, full and almost winged hands, presences that seem to emerge from the canvas, dissolving its edges.
My work always begins with gesture and contact. I use bare hands because I need to feel the material. The palette knife has become a natural extension of the body, a tool that cuts and heals at the same time. Marks, pressure, and incisions become visible transformation.
Within my bas-reliefs, a continuous dialogue develops between fullness and emptiness, light and depth. When I introduce gold, I am not decorating — I am sealing a passage. Gold represents memory, value, and transformation — the moment when matter becomes awareness.
Everything speaks of delicacy and power together, of a feeling that does not need words, only silence and light to be felt. Matter becomes voice, gesture becomes emotion, and art becomes a bridge between what exists and what is perceived.
The creative process follows natural timing made of layering, drying, and strengthening. It may last weeks or months. I move by instinct, yet within a precise structure. It is in the balance between control and surprise that each artwork becomes alive, maintaining a living and unrepeatable presence.
Smussato is not just my personal technique, as I have defined it, it is my philosophy.
It is my way of being in the world.
Smoothing out rough edges. Removing excess. Lightening the superfluous.
It is a gesture that softens the edges of matter and those of the soul.
To smussare is to create. To smussare is to transform matter, to transform myself.
To smussare is to live: removing excess to reveal essence, truth, and the hidden beauty in every detail.
Every work born from the Smussato gesture tells a dialogue between matter and light, between emotion and form, between the visible and what remains subtle, intimate, and personal.
If you wish to enter my creative world, visit www.michelafabeniart.com
For information, artworks, or collaborations write to michelafabeni@libero.it
Follow me on social media and share the journey in continuous evolution.@michelafabeniart
Michela Fabeni
Artist of The Third Millennium
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