V. Francesco De Francesco’s DIACRONIE. A painted dialogue around painting
by Bruno Talpo
After Francesco De Francesco’s exhibition La Grande Madre and the rigorous and indeed persuasive critical interpretations in the catalog, it is hard to come up with a “new” interpretation of the artists’ work, even if the works in — as the artist called it—are mainly new and destined to be exhibited in a culturally suggestive place. But Francesco De Francesco is already used to practicing a contamination of his painting through the tel-quel extrapolation of elements taken from the history of art and brought back to life through memory. And it is in this transference that the aforementioned work of art or a fragment of it, removed from a historical context to be reinserted into a flow of autobiographical references, takes place.
A very important contribution to overcoming an analytical approach that does not always incorporate the multiplicity of the dark meanings associated with the profound, was offered by Emilio Isgrò, who for years had engaged in superb and concrete literary-textual cancellations favoring new visualities. Isgrò invites us to go beyond the perfectly recognizable and sharply focused description of the biographical-testimonial images. In them, Isgrò specifies, “everything seems true, nothing is.”
De Francesco nourishes memory with the imagination and the fantastical, leveraging on an innate ability to represent pictorially and objectively—sometimes of a photographic and filmic nature—illusionistic, almost Magritte-like figures and settings. There is more, or less, respect to the Belgian master, but the comparison is not essential, a particular objective rigor. But if it is necessary to recall Magritte, it is only when he states that the image of an object must not be confused with the real and tangible object. For De Francesceo, as for Calderon de la Barca, “life is a dream.” And I would add: “the dream is life.” An extremely engaging narrative repertoire of reciprocal relationships between art and life emerges from the unconscious. However, with great awareness and clarity, a game of mirrors in which numerous citations of “classical” works of art leads to iconic contamination and hybridization with the autobiographical reality of the author, united by memory and related to space-time. De Francesco refers to the evocation of unrepeatable moments from his own experience, to desires of the unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, but which, through pictorial transposition, take on great dignity, as archetypes and creatures evoking an underworld of the “masses”—at once intensely human and truthful.
In these agitated and yet highly conceptualized evocations, there is a sense of the mystery of existence, the thirst for knowledge, the satisfaction of taste oriented towards the beauty, charm and seduction of art, and the arousal of sublime sensations. De Francesco masterfully interprets myth. In the work he adopts the forms of the folktale, but it is the light that becomes the protagonist here; and the kidnapping is depicted in the foreground inside a particularly crowded market. Is it reality or a re-enactment, a popular legend narrated by a storyteller and theatrically mimed by a Sicilian Pupo. We now come to the analysis of some paintings. In Ciceroniano sei! De Francesco practices a theatrical disguise assuming the appearance of San Gerolamo nello Studio by Antonello da Messina, painted in Venice in 1475-6. In the painting Il dolore del Circo, 1994, penitent Magdalene is present (in the Pietà of S. Maria della Vita in Bologna, 1435) in the compianto by Niccolò di Bari (known as the Ark for completing the ark of San Domenico in Bologna). Basilio Reale appropriately recognizes in De Francesco's work the disturbing presence of the collective unconscious in which the restlessness of our decadent century is reflected, stirring the ghosts of a tragic universal. “Anachronistic” illusionist of the real, De Francesco demythologizes the “production of images emptied of the imaginary.”
An artist-doctor, like Alberto Burri, De Francesco launches in the late-modern panorama— dedicated to “making the invisible visible,” as Paul Klee famously said—a challenge aimed at recovering the imaginative capacity of the past, its values, and its memories. His archetypal images suggest associations freed from the weight of history—timeless dreams. They are memories produced like a vision and placed out of time. But, to enter into their merits, it is necessary to highlight how this pictorial language is virtuosic and fitting for a technique that is not at all superficial, but rather poised between the “Primitive” masters of the fifteenth century and the Naive painters. I share the opinion of Enrico De Pascale when he identifies in De Francesco “a miraculously lucid and precise style (even for the Flemish or Antonellian branches).” The precision of his drawing and the accuracy with which De Francesco portrays the alienating effects of reality, creating other meanings—of a surreal and visionary nature—are admirable and persuasive in his painting. It is no coincidence that among the “greatest” works of De Francesco there is a copious graphic production that results in editions of lithographic and chalcographic folders that deserve further critical study. It is a sky populated with sublime drawings with the souls of William Blake, Heinrich Fussli, John Millais, Odilon Redon... And this itinerary of the fantastic may also include Collodi's fairy tale translated into illustrations, and knowing how to look at the world with an ironic smile. In the works of De Francesco, there is also a sense of silence, as I mentioned above with respect to stillness. Requirements for hospital wards, for a vigil at the bedside of a terminally ill patient, astonishment in the face of the miraculous event, the "marvelous" that stands in the way of the consciousness of the transience of earthly things: the vanitas. Analytical rigor and intellectual clarity lead the viewer to accept the epistematic meaning of the end of man.
The atmosphere that reigns in these scenes of ghostly life is that of suspension in an imaginary space—despite a plethora of references to the History of Art, intertwined with self- introspection—drawing on the dream, chimerical illusion and desire. It is a world that does not belong to everyday reality, instead reality is interpreted in light of immaterial consciousness intended for the most part as transcendent. A mystical quiet belongs to a higher reality in which anxiety for scientific knowledge, and arrogance therein, subsides. As mentioned, De Francesco does not express the metaphysics of the real but combines new dimensions of the fantastical. And it is this dialectical and hermetic approach, a figural culture of contrast (like a search for the philosopher's stone) that makes it eccentric with respect to the most widespread objective and technological postmodern trends. Finally, his works are open to a plurality of meanings as symbolized in the painting which shows a female figure passing through infinite doors. They are the result of the juxtaposition of suggestive clues that fuel the investigation of dark and mysterious questions, leading to the production of icons of the visible that guide the visitor in an overview of the invisible. In this context of cultic elevation of the “powerful” ideas of classical culture, but nourished by the emotions aroused by the experiences of modernity (including Nordic anguish and loneliness), the choice of a temple as a place is consistent deputy to the transhuman and the iconography of the non-profane.
De Francesco's hermeneutic art is oriented, through painting, in the sense of a gnosis which, by revealing the divine in man, identifies with it. Eros—from psychoanalysis—in some of De Francesco's works is embodied in attributes of nudity, furtive and surprised embraces, as illustrations of desires, and as an instrument of beauty rather than an element of seduction. These metaphors and symbolism highlight the artist's dramatic relationship with reality; and even if it is related to the sublime and sometimes the subliminal, it translates into the storytelling and the practice of ars combinatoria. The materialization of ideas in de Francesco’s work can be investigated in an interminable “brain storming” that reveals the hypnotic narrative charm of the works, as well as new details, connections, and allusions similar to Samuel Beckett's theater of the absurd.
The operation of mirroring life involves a kaleidoscope of actions frozen in a mimesis and mimicry that denounce the nonsense of existence, the existential “malaise” that is the basis of modern culture. The beloved creatures to which the artist gives life, as a metamorphosis of (his) everyday life, are visual and literary metaphors of fantastic and meta-objective belonging. This artistic experience, anything but solipsistic, may refer to Paul Delvaux, to the new German objectivity, to Alfred Kubin, proponent of a hallucinating, underground and fantastic world, and to other movements in the field of Psychology. As I anticipated at the beginning, De Francesco’s exhibition has the “hermetic” title diachronie, meaning a temporal succession of events mostly of a linguistic and cognitive (noetic) nature. While in the past the sphere in which iconic passion and often the tautologies were expressed was mainly that of art rather than memory and dreams, in recent works the artist draws on contemporaneity and its rituals giving life to a great theater of the imaginary. Literary extrapolation is by no means descriptive but a game of presences and shadows that interpret and suggest new narrative evocations. In the work Francesco e Ulisse , 1985, the encounter between the mystic, St. Francis, and the knowledge represented by Ulysses takes place, in the background the profile of Assisi understood as spiritual Athens. In Improvviso, 1985, the protagonists are a man portrayed against the light framed in a door, a horse that bursts into a perspective space occupied on the left by an American film staircase from which a southern woman in a slip expressing amazement descends.
In Rossini e la cioccolata, 1986, Rossini is crowned with a laurel by a woman placed behind a Venetian blind while in the center a female figure in the foreground is illuminated by a beam of stage light, and in the background a horse appears on a staircase. Il Ratto di Prosperina consists of a mythical re-enactment carried out with great detail of the event. L’entrata, 1988, reproposes a very surprising situation. In Serenata, 1992, a nocturnal setting with a full moon and cloudy sky, prefigures the anamorphosis of death and the dialogue between the statue of Santa Grata and a guitarist; while De Francesco represents himself reflected in the glass of a window—on the wall is the painting itself. Even more meaningful is Il Teatro dell’Immagine, 1992, which depicts Emily Dikinson in dim light, in the act of handing out a sheet with the words: “the cart that carries the human soul is frugal.” There are also two young women in conversation with a tarot card player, in our case the Temperance. In the Gran Teatro dei Burattini the shadow is as active as it is in Japanese theater, there is also the artist friend Alfredo Pizzo Greco in the role of Mangiafuoco. In Omaggio a Bonomini, 1999, a female nude figure plays blind fly with the death of dressed gray placed inside where the sea can be seen from the window. In La visita, 2001, the artist and model are placed in front of the window from which we glimpse the sea and the Aeolian Islands, as well as Socrates in the center as a mythical statue.
Orpheus e Euridice, 2002, in the tiled interior and perspective, two Hermes stand out, petrified figures, images of the Myth. Venti di guerra, 2003, depicts an atmosphere of suspension with a jazz musician (saxophonist), an elegant female figure in blue depicted from behind and holding a mask while laughing, and in the background the statue of Apollo and a menacing airplane darting in the sky a threatening war plane originally by a cartoonist Scrooge de Scrooge leaning against a pile of gold coins. There is the maximum contamination of the real and the mythical and recourse to the stylistic hybridization of genres. Ombre misteriose, 2003, presents the “mysterious” situation of three statues, the first stable on a pedestal, and the second and third rising while their own shadows appear as if they were resting on a base. In the background a transparent seascape (the Aeolian Islands). In L’Angelo, a winged figure supports the meditative painter.
A very important contribution to overcoming an analytical approach that does not always incorporate the multiplicity of the dark meanings associated with the profound, was offered by Emilio Isgrò, who for years had engaged in superb and concrete literary-textual cancellations favoring new visualities. Isgrò invites us to go beyond the perfectly recognizable and sharply focused description of the biographical-testimonial images. In them, Isgrò specifies, “everything seems true, nothing is.”
De Francesco nourishes memory with the imagination and the fantastical, leveraging on an innate ability to represent pictorially and objectively—sometimes of a photographic and filmic nature—illusionistic, almost Magritte-like figures and settings. There is more, or less, respect to the Belgian master, but the comparison is not essential, a particular objective rigor. But if it is necessary to recall Magritte, it is only when he states that the image of an object must not be confused with the real and tangible object. For De Francesceo, as for Calderon de la Barca, “life is a dream.” And I would add: “the dream is life.” An extremely engaging narrative repertoire of reciprocal relationships between art and life emerges from the unconscious. However, with great awareness and clarity, a game of mirrors in which numerous citations of “classical” works of art leads to iconic contamination and hybridization with the autobiographical reality of the author, united by memory and related to space-time. De Francesco refers to the evocation of unrepeatable moments from his own experience, to desires of the unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, but which, through pictorial transposition, take on great dignity, as archetypes and creatures evoking an underworld of the “masses”—at once intensely human and truthful.
In these agitated and yet highly conceptualized evocations, there is a sense of the mystery of existence, the thirst for knowledge, the satisfaction of taste oriented towards the beauty, charm and seduction of art, and the arousal of sublime sensations. De Francesco masterfully interprets myth. In the work he adopts the forms of the folktale, but it is the light that becomes the protagonist here; and the kidnapping is depicted in the foreground inside a particularly crowded market. Is it reality or a re-enactment, a popular legend narrated by a storyteller and theatrically mimed by a Sicilian Pupo. We now come to the analysis of some paintings. In Ciceroniano sei! De Francesco practices a theatrical disguise assuming the appearance of San Gerolamo nello Studio by Antonello da Messina, painted in Venice in 1475-6. In the painting Il dolore del Circo, 1994, penitent Magdalene is present (in the Pietà of S. Maria della Vita in Bologna, 1435) in the compianto by Niccolò di Bari (known as the Ark for completing the ark of San Domenico in Bologna). Basilio Reale appropriately recognizes in De Francesco's work the disturbing presence of the collective unconscious in which the restlessness of our decadent century is reflected, stirring the ghosts of a tragic universal. “Anachronistic” illusionist of the real, De Francesco demythologizes the “production of images emptied of the imaginary.”
An artist-doctor, like Alberto Burri, De Francesco launches in the late-modern panorama— dedicated to “making the invisible visible,” as Paul Klee famously said—a challenge aimed at recovering the imaginative capacity of the past, its values, and its memories. His archetypal images suggest associations freed from the weight of history—timeless dreams. They are memories produced like a vision and placed out of time. But, to enter into their merits, it is necessary to highlight how this pictorial language is virtuosic and fitting for a technique that is not at all superficial, but rather poised between the “Primitive” masters of the fifteenth century and the Naive painters. I share the opinion of Enrico De Pascale when he identifies in De Francesco “a miraculously lucid and precise style (even for the Flemish or Antonellian branches).” The precision of his drawing and the accuracy with which De Francesco portrays the alienating effects of reality, creating other meanings—of a surreal and visionary nature—are admirable and persuasive in his painting. It is no coincidence that among the “greatest” works of De Francesco there is a copious graphic production that results in editions of lithographic and chalcographic folders that deserve further critical study. It is a sky populated with sublime drawings with the souls of William Blake, Heinrich Fussli, John Millais, Odilon Redon... And this itinerary of the fantastic may also include Collodi's fairy tale translated into illustrations, and knowing how to look at the world with an ironic smile. In the works of De Francesco, there is also a sense of silence, as I mentioned above with respect to stillness. Requirements for hospital wards, for a vigil at the bedside of a terminally ill patient, astonishment in the face of the miraculous event, the "marvelous" that stands in the way of the consciousness of the transience of earthly things: the vanitas. Analytical rigor and intellectual clarity lead the viewer to accept the epistematic meaning of the end of man.
The atmosphere that reigns in these scenes of ghostly life is that of suspension in an imaginary space—despite a plethora of references to the History of Art, intertwined with self- introspection—drawing on the dream, chimerical illusion and desire. It is a world that does not belong to everyday reality, instead reality is interpreted in light of immaterial consciousness intended for the most part as transcendent. A mystical quiet belongs to a higher reality in which anxiety for scientific knowledge, and arrogance therein, subsides. As mentioned, De Francesco does not express the metaphysics of the real but combines new dimensions of the fantastical. And it is this dialectical and hermetic approach, a figural culture of contrast (like a search for the philosopher's stone) that makes it eccentric with respect to the most widespread objective and technological postmodern trends. Finally, his works are open to a plurality of meanings as symbolized in the painting which shows a female figure passing through infinite doors. They are the result of the juxtaposition of suggestive clues that fuel the investigation of dark and mysterious questions, leading to the production of icons of the visible that guide the visitor in an overview of the invisible. In this context of cultic elevation of the “powerful” ideas of classical culture, but nourished by the emotions aroused by the experiences of modernity (including Nordic anguish and loneliness), the choice of a temple as a place is consistent deputy to the transhuman and the iconography of the non-profane.
De Francesco's hermeneutic art is oriented, through painting, in the sense of a gnosis which, by revealing the divine in man, identifies with it. Eros—from psychoanalysis—in some of De Francesco's works is embodied in attributes of nudity, furtive and surprised embraces, as illustrations of desires, and as an instrument of beauty rather than an element of seduction. These metaphors and symbolism highlight the artist's dramatic relationship with reality; and even if it is related to the sublime and sometimes the subliminal, it translates into the storytelling and the practice of ars combinatoria. The materialization of ideas in de Francesco’s work can be investigated in an interminable “brain storming” that reveals the hypnotic narrative charm of the works, as well as new details, connections, and allusions similar to Samuel Beckett's theater of the absurd.
The operation of mirroring life involves a kaleidoscope of actions frozen in a mimesis and mimicry that denounce the nonsense of existence, the existential “malaise” that is the basis of modern culture. The beloved creatures to which the artist gives life, as a metamorphosis of (his) everyday life, are visual and literary metaphors of fantastic and meta-objective belonging. This artistic experience, anything but solipsistic, may refer to Paul Delvaux, to the new German objectivity, to Alfred Kubin, proponent of a hallucinating, underground and fantastic world, and to other movements in the field of Psychology. As I anticipated at the beginning, De Francesco’s exhibition has the “hermetic” title diachronie, meaning a temporal succession of events mostly of a linguistic and cognitive (noetic) nature. While in the past the sphere in which iconic passion and often the tautologies were expressed was mainly that of art rather than memory and dreams, in recent works the artist draws on contemporaneity and its rituals giving life to a great theater of the imaginary. Literary extrapolation is by no means descriptive but a game of presences and shadows that interpret and suggest new narrative evocations. In the work Francesco e Ulisse , 1985, the encounter between the mystic, St. Francis, and the knowledge represented by Ulysses takes place, in the background the profile of Assisi understood as spiritual Athens. In Improvviso, 1985, the protagonists are a man portrayed against the light framed in a door, a horse that bursts into a perspective space occupied on the left by an American film staircase from which a southern woman in a slip expressing amazement descends.
In Rossini e la cioccolata, 1986, Rossini is crowned with a laurel by a woman placed behind a Venetian blind while in the center a female figure in the foreground is illuminated by a beam of stage light, and in the background a horse appears on a staircase. Il Ratto di Prosperina consists of a mythical re-enactment carried out with great detail of the event. L’entrata, 1988, reproposes a very surprising situation. In Serenata, 1992, a nocturnal setting with a full moon and cloudy sky, prefigures the anamorphosis of death and the dialogue between the statue of Santa Grata and a guitarist; while De Francesco represents himself reflected in the glass of a window—on the wall is the painting itself. Even more meaningful is Il Teatro dell’Immagine, 1992, which depicts Emily Dikinson in dim light, in the act of handing out a sheet with the words: “the cart that carries the human soul is frugal.” There are also two young women in conversation with a tarot card player, in our case the Temperance. In the Gran Teatro dei Burattini the shadow is as active as it is in Japanese theater, there is also the artist friend Alfredo Pizzo Greco in the role of Mangiafuoco. In Omaggio a Bonomini, 1999, a female nude figure plays blind fly with the death of dressed gray placed inside where the sea can be seen from the window. In La visita, 2001, the artist and model are placed in front of the window from which we glimpse the sea and the Aeolian Islands, as well as Socrates in the center as a mythical statue.
Orpheus e Euridice, 2002, in the tiled interior and perspective, two Hermes stand out, petrified figures, images of the Myth. Venti di guerra, 2003, depicts an atmosphere of suspension with a jazz musician (saxophonist), an elegant female figure in blue depicted from behind and holding a mask while laughing, and in the background the statue of Apollo and a menacing airplane darting in the sky a threatening war plane originally by a cartoonist Scrooge de Scrooge leaning against a pile of gold coins. There is the maximum contamination of the real and the mythical and recourse to the stylistic hybridization of genres. Ombre misteriose, 2003, presents the “mysterious” situation of three statues, the first stable on a pedestal, and the second and third rising while their own shadows appear as if they were resting on a base. In the background a transparent seascape (the Aeolian Islands). In L’Angelo, a winged figure supports the meditative painter.