Paolo Levi

Critical essay by Paolo Levi:

FRAGMENTS OF MEMORY

The material research of Franca Franchi is presented as an alternative vocation to the death of art, and as a refreshing remedy to poor art.

Though keeping well away from the traditional representation or from pictorial gestures of the informal, her use of poor materials is not negation, but poetic re-elaboration of forms which in any case maintain a stylistic choice, an aesthetic ideality, and the awareness of the fact that nothing is destroyed in the flow of life, that all is recreated in continuity, and that innovation does not mean abnegation.

When Franca Franchi composes a drawing using shattered mirrors, she produces perfect narration, exactly as if she were using colors and brushes, where the matter is not self-referential, but a plastic and pictorial tool, a medium, therefore, not inert visual sophistry.

And here, once again, we recognize the artistic gesture as the spiritual need to reproduce an emotion, the instinctive drive to leave a trace of self, to future memory, as a testimony of having lived, touched, and known beauty.

The artist succeeds in modeling constructions with a strong visual and emotional impact, which nonetheless respond to canons of descriptive clarity, alluding to a mental landscape imbued with spirituality, where the creative act seems to be characterized by the solemn and powerful rituality of Zen culture.

Paolo Levi