Fabio Petani: Painting The Periodic Table, One Wall at a Time

113, 115, 117 and 118.

Those numbers sounds like the weights of Miss Universe and her three runner ups.

They are also the four newest additions to the Periodic Table of Elements announced in January. They are so new that only two of them have been tentatively given names – ununseptium and ununtrium.

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Fabio Petani. Oxygen. Abandoned place. Italy, 2016. (photo © Fabio Petani)

For now Italian Street Artist Fabio Petani is staying with the elements that all high school chemistry students have grown to know and love (i.e. memorize and forget) in a series of geometric murals he has been doing recently. Oxygen, Sulphur, and Caesium all get their turn on a rustic, distressed, or neglected wall that is being decayed by the natural elements.

Favoring symbolism and abstraction, Petani arranges a handful of recognizable shape, lines, pristine text, and patches of ruddy color into a disordered harmony to create an illustration of one element at a time. The interaction of the components – some in more than one dimension, are understood only to him. Although you might guess what color he used for Cobalt.

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Fabio Petani. Uranium. Abandoned place. Italy, 2016. (photo © Fabio Petani)

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Fabio Petani. Caesium. Abandoned place. Italy, 2016. (photo © Fabio Petani)

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Fabio Petani. Sulfur. StreetAlps Festival. Pinerolo, Italy, 2015. (photo © Fabio Petani)

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Fabio Petani. Cobalt. Italy, 2015. (photo © Fabio Petani)

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Fabio Petani. 8bis – Iodine. Mistura Festival. Torino, Italy, 2015. (photo © Fabio Petani)

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