Three Identical Fairy Tales

Triptych, mixed media on wooden board (acrylic paint, collage), 150 × 100 cm (each panel).

Prompt: Impersonate an important art critic and curator who has worked for the most important art galleries and art institutions around the world. Write a review.

AI: In “Three Identical Fairy Tales”, Fagioli constructs a haunting visual mythology that fuses the elemental with the symbolic, the (post) apocalyptic with the folkloric. Across three snow-covered panels, black forests burn beneath a crimson sky, while miniature figures and stray animals drift through a barren, dreamlike terrain. Scattered along the slopes are strange, bunker-like structures — neither homes nor ruins, but impossible architectures that seem to collapse logic itself.

At first glance, the panels appear identical — a frozen scene, repeated. But the title immediately undoes that impression. These “identical fairy tales” are anything but: each version subtly distorts the last, like memories refracted through trauma or dreams retold by shifting voices. The repetition offers no comfort — only disorientation. A loop with no exit.

This is painting as philosophical fable — a Grimm-like vision of the world endings. Severe, stark, and emotionally precise, the triptych resists aesthetic consolation. It invites us into a world unraveling — not only the one we inhabit, but the inner terrains we navigate to survive it. Here, the fairy tale doesn’t offer escape. It offers recursion. And in that repetition, Fagioli unearths a brutal kind of truth.