IV. True Stories
by Enrico De Pascale
Between memory and desire, truth and illusion, De Francesco's work unfolds as a trace of uninterrupted excavations into the mind, a ferocious rummaging in the depths of the psyche that transforms painting into rebus, the canvas into cryptogram.
Through an daily exercise of introspection a thread of memories is woven with a dense web of dreams; and with its slow and meticulous gestures, the art of painting undermines the patient work of memory that pursues itself, its truths, its lapsus, its ghosts. From this lucid and specious perspective, painting overturns its objectives emerging from the slums of the ego, to repeatedly probe the unconscious. Here time and space, reality and imagination intersect, generating theories with disturbing frames, and indecipherable tangles of meaning. As a practice of self-reflection and analysis, painting celebrates its most ancient inclinations by turning the hyperreality of vision into a tale and transcribing the steepest labyrinths of desire in an image. If the staging is modeled on the figurative and linguistic archetypes of the metaphysical-surrealist tradition, from De Chirico to Dali, from Magritte to Delvaux (with a little or a lot of theatricalization of their individual ghosts), the narrative plots evoke peculiar situations, that intertwine the sunny Sicilian landscape with the most enigmatic (and beloved) icons of art history; the most remote “rooms” and the flash-backs of one's life with the heroes and stars of literature, melodrama and contemporary cinema. As if to evoke: the dream of the past in the full and overflowing present. Cultured and refined, De Francesco's painting abounds with secret and complex symbologies, deliberated, according to the great surrealist tradition, with a miraculously lucid and precise style (for the Flemish and even Antonellian branches). And it is certainly not an end in itself but rather in close relationship with the work of slow “focusing” of the darkest and most remote layers of consciousness.In a rethinking of classicism that appears similar to that of postmodernism in architecture and in line with post-Eighties figurative research, from Transavantgarde to Anachronism to Hypermanism, the tradition of art history (but also that of popular ex-voto and storytellers) is not simply crossed but recovered and taken in a relationship of absolute continuity.This happens both through quotation or reminiscence and through a figuration rich in ironic and surreal veins in which “samples” and archetypes function as authentic pictorial “ready-mades,” where memory is confused with myth, as well as with emotion and nostalgia.
Through an daily exercise of introspection a thread of memories is woven with a dense web of dreams; and with its slow and meticulous gestures, the art of painting undermines the patient work of memory that pursues itself, its truths, its lapsus, its ghosts. From this lucid and specious perspective, painting overturns its objectives emerging from the slums of the ego, to repeatedly probe the unconscious. Here time and space, reality and imagination intersect, generating theories with disturbing frames, and indecipherable tangles of meaning. As a practice of self-reflection and analysis, painting celebrates its most ancient inclinations by turning the hyperreality of vision into a tale and transcribing the steepest labyrinths of desire in an image. If the staging is modeled on the figurative and linguistic archetypes of the metaphysical-surrealist tradition, from De Chirico to Dali, from Magritte to Delvaux (with a little or a lot of theatricalization of their individual ghosts), the narrative plots evoke peculiar situations, that intertwine the sunny Sicilian landscape with the most enigmatic (and beloved) icons of art history; the most remote “rooms” and the flash-backs of one's life with the heroes and stars of literature, melodrama and contemporary cinema. As if to evoke: the dream of the past in the full and overflowing present. Cultured and refined, De Francesco's painting abounds with secret and complex symbologies, deliberated, according to the great surrealist tradition, with a miraculously lucid and precise style (for the Flemish and even Antonellian branches). And it is certainly not an end in itself but rather in close relationship with the work of slow “focusing” of the darkest and most remote layers of consciousness.In a rethinking of classicism that appears similar to that of postmodernism in architecture and in line with post-Eighties figurative research, from Transavantgarde to Anachronism to Hypermanism, the tradition of art history (but also that of popular ex-voto and storytellers) is not simply crossed but recovered and taken in a relationship of absolute continuity.This happens both through quotation or reminiscence and through a figuration rich in ironic and surreal veins in which “samples” and archetypes function as authentic pictorial “ready-mades,” where memory is confused with myth, as well as with emotion and nostalgia.