Gaetano Franzese: between idea and representation
The image of Joseph Beuys wearing a felt-hat, big shoes, the vest over the shirt and an old light coat is famous.
Maybe for a superstitious ritual, or perhaps for a symbolic meaning.
All that identified him as an artist shaman, able to animate dead objects, to capture the mysterious secrets of nature.
If I think of Gaetano Franzese and I want to understand the profound idea that dominates his work, I can not but remember Beuys and his way of appearance.
Gaetano also precedes his ideas of a certain "look", not shocking, but for an aesthetic requirement of his internal way to be an artist 360°.
Seeing the works of this Italian-German artist, whose exhibition-apparatus also clarifies “his choreographic” abilities to create art, we cannot remain indifferent to the great communicative power of his "look".
An exposing ability done by psychological callbacks through the involvement of ”I” of “You” of “Us”.
Gaetano Franzese prepares this important new representation of “himself” favouring his tendency to put back the elements into a post-modern way, and to show clearly that they have an emotional impact of great psychological effectiveness where features like the face, the eyes, the lips speak the ancient language of a figurative tradition.
He chooses to paint with a linear personal stretch, graphic style dish, neo-pop, without waiting for the perspective necessities.
As a part of his work he wants to transmit intimate, individual, personal tastes and obsessions, to achieve collective conscious involvement, the introductory statement with the urgent need to communicate with the outside of himself together with the really tumultuous and sometimes incomprehensible.
With the effect that as soon as his voice reaches us, the charge of his "message" reveals the strength, slows, stops to avoid the danger of an unveiling discovering of a final approval.
He wants to appear in "us" without revealing the 'I'.
His works are a pretext, a subtle way to capture our emotions, our most remote driving forces.
When the goal is reached, Franzese retreats to a place of shadows and leaves his "traces", his intentions, at the mercy of our responses, our questions, without putting himself forward for any response.
This methodology is a highly enigmatic artistic one, one to make proposals, in some way ambiguous, very typical of the more orthodox conception of contemporary art and pop, which uses a simple iconography and is of easy reading regarding its schemes.
It's a precise choice. He does not pursue a mere celebration of the figurative feature, rather interesting to him is to capture our attention and our reactions.
In Franzese´s amazing work we astonish his ability to level and align his expressive ways to show art, continuing to specify it in every work, and equipping the little works up to the great works, the ovals, the triangles and all the forms of paintings submitted.
In a way the colours spread out with fine glazes in shades and tones that follow one another from one canvas to the other seamlessly, thereby defining the idea of a great cycle of thoughts and then distributed across diverse media spinning the figure to the edges of the canvas, transforming it into an image of pure iconic value.
The artist has little interest in the gesture of painting, the definition of nuances and grey areas, alluding to the virtuosity, the value of symbols and gesture, but focusses exclusively to emotional stimuli and conceptual representation.
This does not mean that he neglects or underestimates the technical aspect of painting, quite to the contrary he carefully studies every detail, is excellent at creating backgrounds until its vibration is essentially able to support the idea, the projects primary.
Basically, he prefers to highlight the art, hiding the artist.
The centre of his research is precisely the enigma, the ambiguity. He has no need to indicate any message.
Perhaps it is in agreement with Woody Allen when, responding to a reporter who asked him what the message of his film was, said:
“If I had the intention to send a message, I would have sent a fax”.
Pino Bonanno
Gaetano Franzese
-Born in Naples May 30, 1962
-He attended high school and graduated to “National Academy of Dance" Lyceum of Mara Fusco,
Naples
-career as a solo-dancer in Italy, Israel, Austria and Germany
-Studies of theatre-painting in Saarbrücken and Berlin
-Numerous exhibitions of paintings in Germany, Italy, Spain, USA, Austria, Slovenia
-Collaborations with galleries: McGraph (New York), Bertrand Kass (Innsbruck), Anthony
Battaglia (Milan), Matthias Beck (Homburg), Künstler Symposium (Saarbrücken), workshops in
Koper and Piran (Slovenia)
-Lives and works in Saarbrücken, Germany
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