Sergio Signorini

Critical contribution by Sergio Signorini:

"Rapidly Evolutionary Raid"

"Franca Franchi works - or plays- even gambles- with crystals and mirrors (which are still crystals after all!) - on the edge of the abyss: she shatters salvaged material, challenging, without caring about it, the ancient and consolidated IRE of popular superstition, and puts it back together in a spiritual quest for cosmic harmony.

Her breakthrough into the world of art is very recent, but, quickly - with truly surprising speed! She has crossed, in an infinitesimal time and without hesitation, an evolutionary threshold that makes it difficult to guess which territories of the imagination she will cross in the times to come.

Her secret, however, is evident: she works/plays in the present! In an immediate feeling that she takes shape out of a pressing need for transformation. She works with waste materials, recycling them in a virtuous process that paradoxically ennobles them precisely in their waste consistency: weaving them each time into something unique and unrepeatable - in shape and size, reflectivity and opacity, color, uniform or iridescent, and transparency - that of an ideal mosaic. These mosaics, in which the typically oriental holding together prevails, attract, seduce, ad move away from the western dichotomy of either / or, of opposite extremes, of continuous contrast. This aspect probably derives from the origin of Franca Franchi's artistic motion, which is inspired by Masaru Emoto's amazing research on the emotional response of water, more precisely of its crystals, to human action.

The processed materials acquire great expressive power because they symbolize two priority aspects of the human essence and relational wisdom: transparency (of the crystal), which allows you to be yourself, to be spontaneous in the confident expectation of the acceptance of others; the reflexive function (of the mirror), which stimulates every human evolution through the interactional and therefore reflexive responses that the neighbor returns.

The composition of Franca Franchi's crystals proceeds from the environment, whose changing nature allows you to articulate and imagine very different spatialities: from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, sometimes legible, ambiguously, in the same work. In Cristallo "Incontro" (2008), for example, it is possible to imagine two cells, but also two stars, of a completely different nature - one consisting of transparent impalpability, the other of reflective opacity - which begins to interpenetrate, responding positively to the Law of Attraction: two parts that follow the whole of summed characteristics, the sum of which is generally not two, but much more than two. The cosmic shadowy background space can therefore be imagined as the uterine darkness in the highest moment in which life is created, but also as the nocturnal and disturbing infinite space of the celestial vault when two stars are about to collide, generating light and energy from vacuum. The sense of infinite depth then seems to allude to a strong desire for truth, but also to the ecstatic contemplation of the inexplicable mysteries of life, which bring the observer back to the dimension of the one Alvar Aalto called the Little Man.

In other crystals, the background, instead of black and monochrome, appears moved by misty milky streets, counterpointed by scattered and tiny glitters: it is in these works that one seems to feel an unconscious reference to the now historical current of spatialism, which still influences the conception of contemporary spaces, also and above all in architecture. The reflections arising from the natural or polychrome mirror tesserae are also of considerable importance. The first alienating effect is produced by the fragmented reflexivity, in which the observer is sucked in, only to be returned to external reality enriched with self-knowledge. Each portrait, whether partial or complete, reveals the multi-dimensional image of contemporary being: from the multiplicity of the ego to the fragmentation of the self, as if to say that the loss of integrity of one's true image (the self ) is counterbalanced by the multiplication of masks ("the" I's) in order to make us normal, more easily acceptable to others.

In seeing herself fragmented in the mirror fragments, Franca Franchi also induces a new perceptive dimension, as if in the observation, in the contemplation of the crystals one cannot escape a reflexivity that involves and sucks, for which the observer becomes a temporary part, impermanent of the work itself. In this way, the work changes continuously, flows, and regenerates itself in the infinite images of the observer and flows inside them in movement.

This reflexivity also entails enormous difficulties for the photographic representation, starting from the reflections that are introduced unconsciously according to the point of recovery. They become an integral part of the fixed image, therefore, in publications and art essays, they also call the photographer to be an essential textual collaborator, who must select and control the reflections in order to obtain the most respectful image of the nature of each crystal. The photographer fixes the work in a unique and unrepeatable image, linked to the environment of the shooting, an image that - it is assumed - will never be able to be faithfully reproduced again, due to the exclusive uniqueness of the shot itself (observer photographer and interpreter; placement/positioning of the work; mutability of mirrored reflections in place and time; variability, unreproducible elsewhere, of natural or artificial light). If therefore the textual collaborators multiply - among observers, photographers and shooting modes, times and lights - a new complexity arises when Franca Franchi, by stratifying the informal tesserae in thicknesses that detach from the background, the structures in plastic form : the reflexivity itself loses planarity and breaks down the images in a definitely uncontrollable way. A new poetics opens up, which seems to announce a sort of balance and harmony in and of chaos, a return to the primal and profound forces that man, the Little Man, has always tried to reduce to control through order, which moreover, in the infinite and cyclical flow of life, it recurrently yields to informality, which sooner or later sucks up every established order. A recurrence, therefore, an alternation, which is punctually reflected in the confusion - written with a hyphen to unequivocally decree its nature as a compound word - in which Franca Franchi unfaithfully navigates between recognizable figurativeness and informalizing abstraction.

These latter characters are well represented for example in the Crystal “Prayer on Lake Biwa” (2009). The suggestion conveyed by the title seems to orient towards the perception of a "recognizable", vaguely realistic image, taken from above, however, from a satellite to be clear, but the persistence in observation causes, after a variable time from observer to observer, a sort of perceptual overturning, transforming the sensation of the depth of the water into stellar abysses, the image from above into an image from below, very close to the vegetation, which however loses - paradoxically just when it should be most recognizable formally - consistency and form compatible with nature, to become a mere abstraction of the place, understood therefore simply as a temple, at the center of nature and constituted by nature itself, for the raising of prayer. "

Sergio Signorini