I’m Thinking of You
Galleria Changing
Role, Napoli
curated by Eugenio
Viola
In the 90’s Franko B made a name for himself as an icon artist of the
progressive return to bodily themes. A body intended as a theatre of eroticism
and destruction. Fear, violence, alienation, and perversion are the elements
characterizing his radical actions, often glancing behind the limits of the
representation. The artist stages an hagiography of suffering, sets up his
Passion, his laic martyrdom through the ostension of his naked body exhibited,
tortured, celebrated, outraged, mortified, cut, bleeding, glorified, Lived. A
deconsecrated Ecce Homo, whose body inscribes traumas, pain and suffering of
the social body, an hypertext which resets any boundary between the artwork and
its creator, subject and object, art and life.
Nowadays, the artist’s body is replaced by its residual traces, which
celebrate his absence and disseminate in the space of the work reverting it
back to a diaphragm, symbol and meaning of his space dazzled reality. A long
introspective path suspended between destruction and creation opens to a great
eclecticism, crossing multiple languages. Everything gets reabsorbed by the
monochrome absoluteness: from the use of corporal fluids in the performances to
the gold of the backbenches in Gold Benches, to the black of the Black
Paintings and of the sculpturesque Love in the Times of Pain. Scattered traces
of memory, emblems of an absence, a private diary where objects, animals,
things are covered by a deposited thick cover of black paint. A sombre gloss
returning an oppressive and perturbing atmosphere, suspended between tangible
and visible, oneiric and dreadful. A complex, captivating, archaic imagery, in
places almost ancestral, conceptually unifies the whole variegated Franko B’s
production. Moving with agility on the thin line of contrasts: despicable and
sublime, noble and popular, holy and profane, transcendence and desire,
sovereignty and loss, licit and illicit, memory and remembrance, the artist
generates a series of short circuits which catch you unprepared and give back
the controversial realty of the present, its shadow.
Franko B’s visionary and oppressive sensibility taps into the great
iconographic tradition of the memento mori and into spirituality of horror that
characterizes the deadly, counter-reformed Baroque. The equilibrium of the
composition of his work sends, however, back to a more classical, formal ideal,
returns to the brutality of our times, but, at the same time, expresses a
existential breath, recalls the tenderness of human heart, which unravels all
his being in the world.
I Miss You, Long Live Romance, Don’t Leave Me This Way, these are the
titles of some Franko B’s performances. Actions that, beyond the pictorial
nature of the aesthetic impact, opens to a romantic meditation, to the desire
investigated through different tones: separation, solitude, fear of being
abandoned, submission…A work ultimately presenting itself as an enormous,
unconditioned act of love: I’m thinking of you.
Eugenio Viola
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