THE RISK

SILVIA EVANGELISTI

Lecturer at the Alma Mater

University of Bologna

It is difficult to resist the beauty of Franco Guerzoni’s art, created by

a rare harmony of feeling and intellect, poetry and mind.

The artist expresses this through paintings which, although complex

in structure, are joyous and sensual, with bright colours made, like those

of the great masters of the past, from choice powdered ingredients.

A painter with a technique rich in traditional skills, Guerzoni offers a

version of modernity involving an intense fundamental relationship with his

images and with space. In fact, the dialectic between painting and space,

form and architecture, time and memory seems to be essential to his art.

As his works specifically created for CEDIT clearly express, his

creations achieve a perfect balance between the spatial dimension and

intensely lyrical use of colour, which here becomes a soft, liquid form of

matter, wandering across the surface of a dazzling lime-plaster white.

White, metaphor for the clear light of day, as it was in the large,

complex canvases exhibited in his personal exhibition at the 1990 Venice

Biennale, is the background for forms of colour which renew the pleasure

to be had from painting and the memory of an image glimpsed on the

vast expanse of the surface.

In the more recent works, these voluptuous shades are transformed

into subtle shadows of colour that delicately caress the surface.

All it takes is one wall, the only surviving wall of what was once a house,

on which time has recorded its own, unavoidable passing, leaving traces

of colour that is still vibrant, although faded in places, to allow the memory

of the image to transpire, fragile and uncertain, in the physicality of the

surface, to bear tangible witness to the existence of history, a mysterious

visual memory, the extension into the present of the life of things.

A memory of the past on a contemporary wall.

The idea of memory is central to Franco Guerzoni’s poetics: private,

secret memory and the collective memory of the past. Fragmentary

and indecipherable, perceived by the artist with the aid of what is left

of the images, the fragment. A relic of a totality which can no longer

be reconstructed but only imagined in poetic terms, the fragment, a

fraction of an image conserved by time, guides the artist’s fantastic

archaeological journey in search of the world’s memory. However, this

journey takes him in the opposite direction to the archaeologist, for

ARCHEOLOGIE

Archeologie: note sulla collezione | Archeologie: notes on the collection

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