Franca Pisani
It's a question of personal growth, Franca Pisani, born in 1978, was at a very young age able to interact with the artist Eugenio Miccini, founder of Visual Poetry in Florence, who wrote, cut out pieces of paper and pasted them. It was an important moment in her life when she realized it was time to make a clean sweep to understand a new art. She then approached conceptual art.
"Art is creativity, originality, we have to be different but close. Equality is diversity."
Having the parchment paper as a base, she works with clear lacquer: registers the mark in the table, prepares the color, the color passes over the lacquer using natural pigments and finally graphic signs of plaster are applied by the rabbit glue. She works with the clear lacquer in order not to fall into the banal expressions, as she says, artists usually use the academic technique that eventually becomes unoriginal. Therefore she registers exactly what she wants to express in her mind then realize it, without using the academic technique, and creates a strong innovation: daring not to look at her objects and finds this innovative technique as a way of cleansing.
There are four elements represented by boards of parchment paper inside the exhibition space: Water, Fire, Earth and Air; each table has a particular dedicated treatment, a memory of the past in the present. A description of the elements is written in different languages on each board, a choice she made based on her studies of visual poetry. The importance of writing in italics is due to the fact that nowadays we use less italics and more block letters. The Earth artwork, also presented at the Hamburger Bahn in Berlin, with a concept linked to nature has also had the honor to be presented at the Uffizi in Florence, together with 30 other ancient works putting this contemporary piece behind in the front.
By looking through her various artworks you finally find the last element, Air, which is similar to the air flowing through our lungs, representing us, the nature, the animals. It personifies everything that surrounds us, the air that we have a great need of breathing and inhaling.
Franca usually produces monumental artworks, but in this case she has reduced it to realize this small but very significant installation. Everything is made of parchment, made of a special paper and cotton fabric and is treated with oil, turpentine and wax. The parchment becomes a robust eternal. She has always made earth-colored parchment in order to give a neutral chromatic effect but for the first time in these artworks she decided to use color, treated in a completely natural way. The aspect of nature is closely linked to these artworks and Franca does in fact spend most of her time between a hermitage in the countryside in Valdarmo and Pietrasanta, the cradle of several artists and great inspiration. Her communication with nature is essential to her because it is the point of union between her inspiration and her work.
Courtesy of the Artist
Franca Pisani
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