Fabrizio Bellanca was born in Rome in 1968 and grew up in Como, the city that would become the beating heart of his visual research. He graduated in 1987 from the G. Terragni School of Art and in 1991 obtained his diploma in Advertising Graphics from the Istituto Superiore di Grafica at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. From that dual training — artistic and graphic, manual and communicative — emerged an artist who would never stop experimenting. He lives and works in Como, where he runs Fab, an advertising graphics studio specialising in corporate visual identity, publishing and web design. Art and graphic design are not two separate worlds for him: they feed each other, sharing the same gaze on the contemporary world.

A Constantly Evolving Practice
Bellanca’s artistic journey begins in 1989 with the techniques of metropolitan graffiti and writing, applied to canvas with strong colours and abstract geometric forms. This is followed by an experimental phase with resin applied in drops — creating extremely shiny, almost wet surfaces — and then an approach to oil action painting on textured surfaces, with works that move freely between figurative and abstract.
But the real turning point comes in 2004, when Bellanca discovers steel plates as a painterly medium. Armed with a Dremel — the rotary mini-tool with stone and diamond-tipped accessories normally used in craft work — he begins engraving the metal with a stroke surprisingly similar to that of a pencil. A wholly personal language is born: precise, physical, irreversible.

The Language: Metal, Ink, City
On aluminium supports — sometimes plates recycled from typographic printing, sometimes mirror surfaces — Bellanca layers offset printing inks, glass colours and Letraset transfers: letters, numbers, pictograms that add voice to the images, becoming colour at the very same moment that colour becomes word.
The result is an image built through subtraction and layering: it is not the filled areas that define form, but the voids — the parts of aluminium left clean that, activated by the surrounding inks, restore the plastic value of an architecture, a face, a rain-soaked street.
His two favourite subjects are architecture and people. In buildings he searches for the genius of the designer, that structural poetry which speaks for itself. In people he finds the opportunity for a portrait that does not betray but investigates — figures built through surfaces, like contour lines on a topographic map, which in their apparent inconsistency prove more alive than the real subject.
The cities that obsess him have precise names: New York, London, Barcelona, Boston, Milan. He observes them first with a photographer’s eye, then with an artist’s. The contemporary metropolis — its views, its architecture, the people who inhabit it — is the absolute protagonist of his work.

The Main Series

Bellanca’s work develops through thematic cycles. The best known is Yourban Soul, dedicated to the soul of metropolises: iconic architecture and human figures in motion.
From this research, in 2013, came the Virtualoid project — subtitled jump back in the future — a series of works in Polaroid format on engraved aluminium that function as a visual sketchbook: sketches, notes, ideas suspended between one large work and the next. Its abstract variant is Soulscape, where the urban landscape dissolves into interior forms.
In recent years his research has opened towards nature with the Urban Nature series, where trees, leaves and water lilies emerge from the same metal supports as the metropolises. Alongside this, Bellanca continues to work on the human portrait: from large ink drawings on paper such as Monica I and Hedy Lamarr, to private commissions, through to the CigARS series — an ironic and affectionate gallery of twentieth-century icons immortalised with their cigar as a visual signature.

Selected Exhibitions and Awards