Criticism

New paintings by Franca Marini
by Rolando Castellón
exibition brochure, Yerba Buena Gardens Cultural Center
San Francisco, 1991

To Franca Marini, the act, process and content of painting is a personal, emotional struggle. The canvas becomes an autobiographical arena to recreate inner responses to reality, intellect, dreams. Her imaginary landscape depicts a primordial space in which to explore the fusion of emotion with reality, to find harmony between personal and art historical past.

The content of Marini’s paintings discloses a drama of conscious and unconscious thought set in geometric space. A palpable light meanders within the nebulous, austere, color-saturated space, creating a delicate balance between the real and the imagined. The artist infuses this elusive atmosphere with subliminal elements that are more definite than space, including words, sentences, or symbols such as arrows and boats, both of which signify direction, forward movement, energy.

Marini’s painting process involves a working and reworking; the image is built and rebuilt, changed, destroyed, finally resurrected to satisfy both the moment and a timeless need. In a gesture towards modernity, the artist adds to the edges of the square or rectangular canvas, wooden, lead, or painted fragments which contrast the rigid format of the canvas. These elements may be abstract, may contain details from old masters’ paintings, or may be a continuation of the central theme. Their ambiguous presence provides outside energy to the composition and lends geometric meaning to proportions and to tangible space.

In the end, the works evoke a nostalgic calm, a distant silence left in the aftermath of chaos.


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The Interior Landscapes
by Robert C. Morgan
exibition catalogue, Elizabeth Harris Gallery
New York, 1996

There is a story in these paintings - a story that is on the border between fantasy and reality. These paintings are microcosms of a spiritual awakening told within the simplicity of a mythological world. Franca Marini's new series of paintings is about the interior landscape - the place where reality is transformed and given a mythical stature. Yet her knowledge of these images comes from a perception of the exterior world. To paint from the interior and give it a semblance of reality is a single-minded task. It requires a certain obedience to one's vision, to one's inner vision. Access to Franca Marini's paintings may come by way of her Siennese heritage, but there is more to the story. The "Interior Landscapes" are much more than an historicist's venture from the past into the present.
Franca Marini came to the United States several years ago, initially settling on the West Coast in San Francisco where she attended the San Francisco Art Institute. She returned to Italy for a few months, then came back to New York where she has been working for nearly half a decade. Although these "Interior Landscapes" are informed by the villages of Tuscany, their symbolic presence becomes the issue. The huddled groups of people with their horses and cattle, the looming sky with its pear-shaped clouds, the hills, the strange, mystical light, the abstract specters, the angels in black and white, soaring through the heavens -all of this is a far cry from Manhattan's hard-edged urbanity. Yet, to distance oneself from the source of memory begets a certain pleasure. To get into another mode of reality in order to re-discover one's past, and then to transform that reality is the task of art (or psychoanalysis). As the writer Thomas Wolfe discovered, sometimes being too close to one's origin may prevent the likelihood of ever discovering how one feels. The struggle to learn of one's origins may require a necessary distance.
Some artists are possessed with themselves in such a way as to project a deluge of narcissism into their work; but then there are others who express hope and who give us another understanding of life, a fresh point of view. Franca Marini is an artist who delivers a story through a highly articulate visual vocabulary. It is a story that emanates from another source, a source that is closer to nature than the cynical endgame of fashion and urban despair. To really see these paintings offers the viewer something special. To read the color and the forms and to look deeply into the texture of these surfaces is an experience that goes beyond the normative structure of everyday reality.
To experience Marini's paintings is the opposite of designating oneself as victim in the electronic, hypertextual morass at the end of the second millennium. From a Buddhist point of view, one might say that the paintings of Franca Marini affirm a faith in mind. They are the gift of a painter who understands that life never really gets beyond the basics, and that the history of art is essentially a lesson in how we envision those basics. This is what brings the sun-drenched bottles of Morandi in contact with Malevich's Suprematism. They are works that represent a simplicity and directness -a painter's vision that is made manifest for others to see.
Franca Marini's paintings of village people huddled together under a huge sky offer a reverberation of color and an excitement about life. This is what happens when life exists in relation to the spirit of art. And what is the discourse that supports this spirit? Here is a task for semioticians and social scientists to unravel. But for most viewers, the pleasure of these intimate visions, removed from the metropolis, has much to tell us. Marini has searched the interior at a distance in order to evolve a new perspective on the present. It is a discourse ultimately about painting; yet within these paintings are representations of simple lives ridden with spiritual anxieties that are close to all of us, regardless of culture, race, or class. They are paintings that represent how life stays the same and remains the source of pleasure and mystery if we allow the experience to become our source of understanding.


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The sense of things
Some notes on Franca Marini's paitings
by Anna Maria Panzera
exibition catalogue, "Sogno di un nuovo mondo - opere recenti", Museo dell'Antica Grancia
Serre di Rapolano (Siena), 2001, p. 38-41
translator: Nancy Podimane

Searching for the sense of things is the work of miners, of gold diggers. It's difficult to see exactly what appears beneath our eyes when reflexes on the water trick us into imagining hidden treasures.
What is latent, hidden beneath the veils of visibiIity, invites us to exercise our imagination, transforming the stimulus of perception and the reaction that follows in a presence that enriches the object of our glance, perceiving it in every fold of sound emitted, and making sure never to impoverish it.
When however the obiect in question is a work of art, it primarily asks not to be understood (in the common sense of this word), but looked at so that it can speak its own language freely, and is free to test if the expression manages to become communication even when offered through gestures, with Iines and colours. Often a foreigner in his own country, the artist could ask the art critic to step aside, or at least to undertake the effort to free himself of an excess of baggage of acquired notions, when searching for that speck of gold that has eluded all too familiar trends. Naturally without sacrificing all that he knows because he must be of help to those who for the first time come face to face with the unknown artist and his work.
Bearing all this in mind I go to see Franca Marini's canvases which she agilely moves from wall to wall and from room to room, during a visit to her studio perched on a gorgeous Siennese hill. The daylight filters through the rain, lit up here and there by sunrays peeping over blankets of clouds, playing an important part in this context. Even though the studio is artificially lit and later on I find myself analyzing her work through a set of perfectly illuminated photographs, the overall impression of that day remains mixed in with those photos viewed and the written words which emerged at a later stage. Will the artist have it in for me because of this?
But no, it was she that started on about how much she loved the orange and grey hues of the sky. Or those blue tones interrupted dramatically by the stark white of cirrus. I seem to understand that the artist's imagination runs along the tracks of memory transformed in gesture before becoming thought: I find myself doing the same in response to her invitation to write about her. I look at the paintings: a privileged position given to sudden spurts of earthy yellows and reds; a continuous Iine, at times broken, sometimes black, coloured every so often and shading off into the background; the occurrence of the latter transports us into the heart of a particular perception, now and then managing to prevail over the entire composition.
Franca's paintings give me the sensation of something known to us whilst appearing innovotive. One cannot help but make a comparison with the most relevant events that have taken place this year: the Roman exhibitions of Calvesi and Bonito Oliva on the Modern and on contemporary art; the last Biennale of Venice which having received a number of blows in the past provoked by age-long disputes and lapses in style, was able this year to come through with a host of fresh young talent, a reflection of the current curator's tastes, Harold Szeemann. Without attempting elaborate constructions and a specific analysis of each event, already adequately covered in specialistic journals, I'd Iike to mention what is evident to all. In the presence of the most modern means offered to us by technology alongside more traditional practices, most of the work offered for viewing reveals to have a conceptual soul which fails to arouse me; frankly speaking nor does it interest or intrigue me, save for my duty as an art historian.
My personal inhibition? Well I defend it and am willing to make an intellectual identity out of it because I'm looking for other things in art and I know that I am exercising a legitimate refusal of aesthetic operations which originate from a poisonous and antihumanist ideology. Nevertheless, the confrontation may prove useful: the young artist finds the national and international scene of the aesthetic disciplines open to him or her, Franca Marini is a young artist; amongst other things she, like them, has undergone long training and had exhibitions outside the national circuit, overseas where, unlike here, a different and perhaps more intelligent policy towards new talent exists.
So Franca Marini must have certainly had close contact with current trends: the everpresent video-art, the modern futurism of computer-art, the sophisticated photographs, the performances, the more or less pathological way in which some artists present the body, multimedia, installations and so on. Nevertheless, her expression has remained linked to ways that we would call less avant-garde, still lingering on the softness of pictorial materials, on a beautiful sign, on the beauty of colour.
If in some of her previous works - here not on show - we could detect in Franca Marini's work some elements in harmony with the Transavanguardia (the presence of expertly modulated pictorial material, the imposition of the figure and its semantic implications, recognizable elements in the midst of signs that are less interpretable at first sight, an atmosphere that at times bordered into the symbolic or at times denoted a reluctance to abandon personal or familiar myths), today her canvases go against current trends. In l984 Giovanni Testori stated in reference to the new painters of the Transavanguardia. "In contrast to the protest offered by their fathers, their protest don't betray an ideological or social nature: moreover a torrentially existential one; perhaps, in reality an inscrutably fetal one. ( ...)
These artists know that man's blindness cannot be explained by this or that power, as we once thought, but rather and perhaps more brutally, by that basic condition that is birth; it is as if every man's umbilical chord is attached to some obscure lump, some obscure tuft of darkness, of ruin and of death"(1).
I am convinced that Testori's analysis mirrors quite faithfully the theoretical basis that was at the heart of the art of Transavanguardia (perhaps stilI today) even if some artist has probably found fault with such peremptory statements. What we can be sure of is that the images that emerge from Franca Marini's work don't move in this direction: we read in her work a negation of Testori's theory of the origin of and reason for man's blindness; moreover we witness creativity, potentiality, and a progressive growing awareness of the world of colours and forms awaiting to be transformed by the imagination of the artist into visual images.
Is this the world that inhabits the pictures on show? What is being translated into elements of linear and chromatic abstraction? It seems to me that we find ourselves before a real movement backward - both in terms of the path which her art is following, and in terms of the artist's own life - which, far from representing a regression in taste and concerns, imposes itself instead as originality. Perhaps we are best to calI it originary.
I'II try to explain better what I mean. At the moment contemporary art subsidized by an impressive number of curators of exhibitions and by artists, shows a marked tendency towards the art of quoting, whether consciously or not, the works produced by now famous artists belonging to artistic movements of the 6Os and 7Os in the l9OOs. In an interesting article which appeared in number 227 of "Flash Art"(2), the art historian, Marco Senaldi, depicted a faithful picture of the situation, highlighting the fact that the fundamental poverty of ideas in contemporary modern art is an indication of an extreme weakness in thinking. This weakness, far from being passed off as a mental attitude (as I previously mentioned, the antihumanist philosophies reproposed which have long lost their provocative push and their cerebral density, dissolving themselves in an absence of proposals and inconsistent theories), has led artists to a crossroad which has them repeating products which have now become prescribed works (performances and installations included), and has seen these very artists enter the art market. Even when the viewing material offered to eyes that have grown increasingly indifferent (on the other hand a critical approach is never required), purports to be detestable or attempts to provoke that Freudian sense of "perturbance", at most it seems to cast a cheeky wink at us but nothing very lasting that we don't manage to drown in drinks and amiable conversation of the vernissage.
Art criticism has become a refined exercise of rhetoric and persuasion and when it participates with the artists themselves in the quest for success it loves to lose itself in the meanders of the "concept": one no longer looks for the meaning and the sense of art (as Senaldi correctly points out, alongside our search for what is "new", these values are seen as too closely linked with the Modern, and therefore demodè), the identity of the artist, solely recounted to us in terms of aesthetic experiences to the exclusion of a more personal history seems to matter little. On the other hand, convinced as we are that art cannot be separated from the person, aesthetic must be considered in so far as human, and here derive comfort from the words of Harold Rosenberg(3), a scholar who certainly cannot be considered passè. Without a doubt, therefore, Franca Marini must be considered out of fashion. One can see not only traces of a life course which take us back in time - long before the 6Os and more so the 7Os - to that prolonged avant-garde operation where the figure and the form were destroyed in the search for the emergence of a sign which constituted the attempt to unveil the language of the unconscious, the synthetic nature of the first expressions, the indefinite quality of the first images of life. That thing that all men search for, that thing that only artists succeed in representing; that thing that works scholars up as they try to understand whether the image presented as absolute and indiscutable be really so or a mere deceit, if it be a true self expression or a falsification.
To do this it is necessary to understand if the regression mentioned above is purely a formal one, or whether it be a movement backward undertaken by the artist from exteriority to interiority, her own. Here, naked before us, her soul unveils before us with courage and pride. No concepts, no declaration of intent, no innovative material. The canvases become colored and pasted with heavy brushstrokes, lines unravel and writhe before us forming shades of geometric forms, hints of a form, the odd letter. Is this Informal art? Action painting? Material painting? Concrete poetry? Visual writing? Definitions which say it all and yet nothing.
From l988 onwards, the year in which Franca first landed in America, and perhaps earlier still, from the days when she first presented her work to an Italian public, her pictorial work has undoubtedly changed. Characterized by a heavy black trait, many of her paintings presented a very close tie with figurative themes and with traces of conscious thought, which were gradually transformed into geometric or human forms that have currently disappeared altogether from sight.
The chromatic material, instead, has remained dense and deformed, moulded in ways one would call expressionistic, capable of creating different atmospheres: the vitality of red -orange, the blacks which repel, and the open and inviting whites. Alongside these exquisite pictorial elements, one finds a line that seems to be the one traced in her early work: in reality, it once served to give a contour, to close in, now it tends to move along the canvas in a totally arbitrary way. It no longer contains a figure, but this does not impede it from becoming longer and longer in order to become a form itself, at times rather harsh, almost Iike in xylography, especially when it sits on a clear background. In other moments it's a grid that seems to hold in traces of memory, images and forgotten perceptions, that re-emerge only if recalled by that infallible stimulus that is triggered off when one puts brush on canvas. Colors held tight on strips of harlequin material and then letters, forms, and sounds. Not unlike the voice of a friend we hear that becomes entrapped in the soft tissues of our interior selves where it clashes with the pointed or curved truth which emerges.
History tells us of that research on the sign and of the torment attached to the sign that becomes writing. Who knows if painting suffers from a passionate amorous envy in respect to those small traces, suspect of possessing the secret of creativity which color has always wanted for itself.
It certainly cannot be denied that contemporary art is alI played out in confrontation with language (and in this Franca is very contemporary); in spite of this, when a letter is placed on a support which isn't its own, such as on a canvas, the Saussurian terms of langue and parole, of sense and meaning intensify and become complicated; the most accredited of linguistic and semiologic theories don't give us satisfactory replies (even if their contribution has been important in the visual arts), whereas art - in removing from language its denotative role - runs the risk of delegating it to a purely decorative role. From the discovery of the gestural nature of the pictorial sign in the l95Os until the most recent works of visual writing by artists like Accame, the introduction of writing in painting is often (always?) characterized by a prevalently rationalist and analytic attitude which, in my opinion, has infatuated critics but has distorted research, and many irrelevant theories which borrow from traditional psychoanalytical thinking have come into existence. Nevertheless, today the most vital artistic exploration is the one that takes for granted the existence of a link between language and images which is not ecphrasical in nature and attempts to recuperate the image within the word, inside the letter not only at a graphic level. The problem, however remains that of not becoming too abstract, or cerebral, or religious; the challenge resides in finding the roots of language -including verbal - in one's own life even before the learning process takes pIace. This is what was being referred to when speaking of undertaking a journey back to one's interiority. The artist who undertakes such a journey will inevitably come up against the common credence that language is solely the fruit of reason.
I believe that Franca Marini seems to have disentangled herself from this impasse permitting her lines, even when paying tribute to language acquisition, to remain free to move, separating or mixing in with colour but avoiding the rigidity of abstract thinking. It seems as if, once the object of the painting has disappeared the artist does not find herself facing that "void" that so preoccupied Kandinskii so as to lead him to those little improvised albeit non-figurative compositions where reasoning and the melody of numbers offered an invisible structure to the signs he made. Here the only structure present (if one can call it so), seems to be that of the imagination; interior limits seem, one by one, to disappear leaving only those desired by the structure. No fear of emotivity or subjectivity here, nor of interpretation. A privilege of course that will be left to the viewer.


(l) G. Testori, Ritorna il fantasma di Edipo, in "II corriere della sera ",November 14 l984.
(2) M. Senaldi, Niente di personale. La fragilità teorica dell'arte contemporanea, in "Flash Art", year XXXIV, n. 227, April -May 2OOl.
(3) See H. Rosenberg, L'arte è un modo speciale di pensare, edited by M. Cianchi, U. Allemandi & C, Turin -London 2OOO.




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The voice of silence
by Cristina Piersimoni
exibition catalogue, "Sogno di un nuovo mondo - opere recenti", Museo dell'Antica Grancia
Serre di Rapolano (Siena), 2001, p. 47-49
translator: Nancy Podimane

Franca Marini's work can be grouped together under one theme; the interior world that becomes a scenario for a symbolic-mythological narration where dream and imagination replace the real world to give life to situations that are stigmatized by movement; a choreographic rather that dynamic world where figures animate the pictures either singly or in groups or, as her later work evidences, by lines.
The process of the pictorial act, therefore, ends up being a personal and emotional voyage of a psychological nature which tends to reveal the deepest layers of thinking through the analysis of one's own past in relation to a historical-artistic past. But the transposition of feeling that Franca Marini applies to her art permits image and background to freely interchange roles, without obliging the viewer to respect conventions whereby the scene containing figures in the foreground is more important than the landscape, as was so before the advent of 19th century French realism, which would otherwise cause one to overpower the other. Quite a relevant consideration if we keep in mind that the same chromatic tonality is being used both in the background and for the figures.
Franca Marini divides the work of the last decade into cycles, which in synthesis correspond to five series with the following titles: "The fall of the rebel angels", "Interior landscapes", "Invisible movement", "Emergence", "Dream of a new world".
The passage from one cycle to the next knows no brusk interruption; it is as if the initial idea undergoes a slow and gradual metamorphosis to finally reach a total modification both on a stylistic level - which nevertheless is a continuum of the previous one - and in terms of contents, taking the limits of her work to extremes.
This poetic journey which at the beginning of the 9Os was dictated by her state of mind during her voluntary exile in America, finds a new form of expression in which medieval Sienese art encounters contemporary art in the integration of iconographic elements borrowed from masterpieces of the past
with brief forays of a neoexpressionist nature. Here the human figure blends in with the landscape where imagination becomes a concrete expression, like abstract thought process is generated by the apparent simplicity of the representation and the mysterious complexities of the mind. These are oneiric visions which come from deep and ask questions about man's destiny using pictorial means in a dialectic confrontation with "tradition" to express a spiritual tension intent on feeling the mystery of life through the process of knowledge.
The mystic light that envelopes the landscape filling it with an otherworldly feeling that highlights a sense of fixity in a rarefied atmosphere, altering the perception of reality materializing itself into an extraordinary flight of an angel among onlookers as an element of interruption which redimensions the
centrality of the scene.
The austerity of the representation, instead, creates a distance between the ego and the external world that cannot be filled, leaving us full of doubts and unresolved questions. A distance, however, that is filled by images that are an elaboration and realization of an internal, psychic state through which a relationship and link with the daily world is possible.
Whilst the ethereal and the unconscious are technically translated through the superimposition of transparent veils of paint onto the canvas, which dissolve with poignant poetry, the characters stand out in vivacious colours.
This visionary quality that oscillates between reason and imagination, abstraction and figuration, has a polarizing function of a conceptual and contemplative nature realizing a specular interplay of duplicities; between order and chaos where the protagonist is the intermediate space that lies between impulse and action. Therefore in order to understand these paintings we must turn to our memory for help that can act as a sort of mediator.
In her paintings Franca Marini always introduces some elements that, whilst related to the real world from whence they originate, seem, on the other hand, abstract in so far as they are used symbolically and in a general way. If at the beginning of the 9Os they were citations from the works of the Italian masters of the past; by the mid-9Os they had become human figures in various poses acting, but in fact they were just poses taken from some photographic shots; to finally get to the later works where we have letters from the alphabet, chosen randomly, and used simply to mean language.
But these ambiguous presences which appear insignificant at first sight, charge the paintings with a potential energy transforming the pictorial surface into a tangible space that breaks and, at the same time, exalts the deafening background silence.
It is as if Marini's work encloses a drama: the struggle between rational and irrational, conscious action that tries to include the explosive, emotional, passionate unconscious part which is however dangerous because uncontrollable.
At the beginning of the year 2OOO, like any artist who wishes to affirm her identity, Franca Marini begins to perceive the images with which she had so far confronted herself as a limit, as an obligation, in that they represented preconstituted values: and this crisis which proves decisive for her work leads
her towards a non-obiective, more improvised style of painting, gestural in nature as well as laden with signs.
We see in her more recent work, in fact, that the tortuous line wraps and then unwraps itself forming a web to then unravel itself, drawing a space saturated by colour delicate in its chromatic balance where calm and restlessness are intertwined to form a weaving full of signs.
The palpable light slides through the tangle of lines and conducts us into the meanders of the surface of the painting composed of subliminal elements that allude to an indefinite space in perfect equilibrium between the real and the imaginary.





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New works by Franca Marini
by Dunia Molina
exibition catalogue, “Reconstrucción en rojo Nuevas Obras”, Galería Nacional
San Josè, Costa Rica, 2005, p. 54
translator: Nancy Podimane

Franca Marini was born in Siena, in Italy, where she completed her artistic education and training to then move onto New York, where she lived and exhibited her work for over ten years. Marini is the author of a complex language of purified forms which reveal an acute power of transformation, that goes from the series of The rebel angels to the introspective landscapes followed by the Invisible movement series and to end up with another called Emergence. This artistic journey characterized by a change of techniques and themes finally takes Franca Marini to the world of abstract condensations where she expresses herself with the use of large paper collages.

In a confident and constant artistic journey, the artist continues transforming her work and, what were once spaces full of characters that shed their weight and fall to the ground, the rebel angels, become other spaces peopled by celestial angels, heavy clouds in geometric form, mystic characters that share the space with static horses in horizontal conglomerates.

Today Franca Marini, once again transformed, presents to the public of Costa Rica some new works realized especially for the halls of the Galería Nacional and leaves her world behind to adopt positive and negative pictorial spaces, which in her unconscious may be black or white angels, substituted with new areas of colour or absence of colour.

The eternal struggle between good and evil which imbued her past work, has taken on a new language. These new works, which feature positive and negative spaces of colour, at times transform themselves into full or empty spaces that give a complete equilibrium to her contemporary creations.

Franca Marini’s exhibition in the halls of the Galería Nacional of the Centro Costarricense de Ciencia y Cultura, realized with the participation of the department of Contemporary Art History of the Università degli Studi di Siena, constitutes a significant moment of collaboration between two important public cultural institutions and represents a considerable happening for the Costa Rican art world giving us the opportunity to appreciate meaningful and sober art work characterized by a great formal variety, revealing and reaffirming an optimism for life and a sublime sense of beauty.





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Winged words
by Silvia Bandini and Esther Biancotti
exibition catalogue, “Reconstrucción en rojo Nuevas Obras”, Galería Nacional
San Josè, Costa Rica, 2005, p. 55-56
translator: Nancy Podimane

For Franca Marini a work of art is a living creature that undergoes change, perfects and transforms itself, turning the image into a non conscious message: it is born in a vague manner and gradually comes to the fore.
The emotion which takes shape and gives rise to its expression is crucial, relying on improvisation to get away from rationality. This calls to mind the artists of the Action Painting movement even if there is a point of divergence: the sign where the emotion is sealed is not the subject of her work but rather the image which for this artist must always be laden with contents. Therefore the line, the colour and the material become the instruments that she uses to represent that “other thing” present in her unconscious.
To understand her recent research it is necessary to review the last years of her artistic life where experimenting with new materials necessary for the discovery of new horizons has gone hand in hand with a deepening of the relationship between the work of art and space.
In the series Condensation (2002-2004) the nebulous image is entirely constructed by a collage of small pieces of paper which overlap and reach a stratification which seems to allude to a third dimension; a tridimensionality which comes to life in sculpture Birth with colour (2003-2004) where the single fragments of coloured paper are transformed in clear-cut intersecting planes.
The viewer’s involvement spans 360 degrees inviting him to a total exploration in which his glance is captured by the enveloping movement of the forms and by the progressive discovery of the insertions of coloured ceramics, points of light that scan the rhythm of the vision.
When instead the artist is dealing with bidimensionality, she extends the space: she encircles it and resolves it by finding new solutions each time, she doesn’t want obstacles, she remains on the canvas until it forces limits onto her, but if she is obliged, if it suffocates the ideas she then gets away from it to “overturn” it.
In Theatrical representation (2004-2005) the need to leave behind the rigidity of the rectangular format to dialogue with the surrounding space is more than evident. A grid of lively colours opens the stage curtains revealing once again the line which had been absent since the series Dream of a new world (2000-2001). Above the panel irregular geometric forms of multicoloured ceramics appear as if they are placed in a casual way and gradually slide along the surface where they remain entangled.
In spite of the allusion to a theatrical scene we see no definite figures in the image but only a play of indecipherable forms which are inexplicably touching and moving. A simple language, almost archaic and at the same time refined and filtered.

In the rooms of the Galería Nacional de Costa Rica we witness a further elaboration of the concept of space that, as the artist reveals to us, is a result of the need to amplify the communicative power of the work to establish a total empathy with the viewer, reminding us that it inhabits the very space in which the viewer moves.
They are works in which one can relate at the moment of implosion, attracting us without letting us go because, if we look carefully, they are likely to lose their contours, that is their connection with the surrounding reality, taking the viewer to a far-off cushioned reality. They represent the fusion of the artist’s impassioned and fragile lyric vein with her detached and crystalline style achieved through a slow and progressive deepening of her expressive skills and innate abilities.
Reconstruction in red, undisputed protagonist of the exhibition, is an installation realized in an extemporaneous manner in these very rooms. Parallel to the research into space is the research into the materials: the velvet paper stimulates in the viewer a tactile perception, arousing in one the spontaneous desire to come close and touch it, listen to it, experience it. It is a material with which the artist establishes a direct relationship, that challenges, yields and finally cuts to achieve a harmony that gives meaning to the space. Through the cuts we perceive the walls, the intense red of the velvet paper and the stark white of the space permeate each other and seek each other out.
This work of art is full of light, a light which is intrinsic to the material whose force generates emotions.
It acts and reacts within the space, activating it and communicating with it to undergo a transformation and modification allowing its viewers to participate in an intimate and solitary feeling which is enriching and vital: red is the blood that flows, it is the energy that runs into the branched veins of the material which compels the viewer to become hypnotized by the research into mental fluids which make up one’s interior life composed of light and shadows.
Franca Marini succeeds with agility and immediacy to introduce these two opposites into her work through this play of shadows created by the cuts in clear shapes projected onto the wall.
After the fragmentation of the material…as well as the fragmentation of the ego she achieves the creation of an entirety through the use of coloured woollen threads that allow her to unite and assemble the single parts by re-sewing them together.
This new process of reconstruction is experienced by the artist as an evolution of the previous experience of collage: an evolution which has taken place unwittingly, just like the artist declares to be unaware of the connection she has established with the ancient textile work of pre-Hispanic populations.
The “thread” takes her back in time and projects her into the stratified memory of generations and far-off lands whose presence is still felt today. It is the “buena onda” that flows along that thread…the work of past hands that caresses her memory.
She herself in hindsight interrogates herself as to why she used it...is it consequential? ...is it casual? Surely, she claims, it can’t be casual, because it reveals a real meaning which her unconscious has transported to the work. There cannot be an unequivocal interpretation, everyone finds and interprets his/her own “thread” within the collective memory that takes on an individual course in the viewer.
Franca Marini manages to surprise us also in the other big work Thinking / Doing where the style of the “bella pittura” seems to exceptionally blend in with the instantaneous performance of the graffiti artists by her uninhibited use of spray paints.
The coloured threads play an important role again and with various meanings.
The support is formed by the union of maps sewn together with a string, in the attempt to annul distance which the artist perceives to be not of a material but of a mental nature. She thus places herself in synthony with themes that make up contemporary social debate: borders and overcoming them, the mixing of languages and cultures.
In the image we can denote the shape of two large hands that enclose us within a global space; it is one hand that looks for the other, reaching out for the other in spite of the perception that they are different, it is man who is the protagonist that must face the complex diversity of populations, it is the cosmopolitan and multicoloured reality of her New York experience that she seems to want to recuperate. The threads connect the two shapes and weave them together to create a multitude of colourful forms, escape from the work, expand their contours and look for points in the surrounding space.
The thread of thought comes together and allows very distant and heterogeneous elements to merge; very fine threads of thought, winged words that reveal new worlds.





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Urban Lines
by Ivana D’Agostino
exhibition catalogue, “Urban Lines”, StudioArteFuoriCentro
Rome, 2008
translator: Heather Holloran

This is the first exhibition in Rome by Franca Marini, Sienese artist by birth and formation, who, with the show Urban Lines at the “Studio Arte Fuori Centro”, offers an overview of her research on New York, defining emotions and reflections experienced during the years spent in the Big Apple and re-examined today through the distancing lens of the comparison with the reality of Siena, once shunned, and with Rome, a new capital of the arts, although so different by history and tradition from the American city. What the artist proposes is a video-installation lasting fifteen minutes and projected in a continuous cycle. Images of New York, black and white and colour, variously manipulated on the computer by the artist, urban images which are interpolated at different speeds synchronized with  contemporary background music, specially adapted  for this video by Gianpaolo Cappelli & Car_Ma (Carlo Torrini and Maso Ricci).
Various visual experiences intervene in the creation of this video-installation: from informal painting to sculpture installation to signicic abstactionism to the metropolitan graffiti of Rammellzee and Basquiat. We find the contamination above all in the computerized manipulation of the images whose sequences built of fragments are at times very short flashes, like the initial very quick glimpse of the plane taking off, immediately reabsorbed  by the images of the  New York subway, seen through the dirty windows of the trains. The abstract introductory images, constructed by the artist using visual material from her show in Buffalo of 2007, together with a rotating globe, introduce the idea of the universality of New York, of its frenetic movement, of the loss of identity of those who live there, sucked down into the vortex, to which the tangles of mad abstract signs allude, with their trails in space following the surge of the music. The images  of the American city, filmed in the underground and on the streets, real and electronically manipulated, chase one another at a hectic rhythm. The voices and the noises inserted into the fabric of the background music contribute to communicate to us directly the greatest quantity of information and sensations on New York following a principle  which Marini  inherits from the innovative experience of the total art of the avant-garde movements.
The urban lines of the city create outlines with various contours. Continuously fractured and broken in New York by the frenetic bustle of the people, instead they stretch continuous and uninterrupted in the silent outlines of the walls of Siena. The sublime and aristocratic beauty of this town wrapped in its extremely rich history, seen in the distance and in transparency, as a memory of an absolute intangible perfection, is further enhanced by the contrast established with the  frame which immediately follows, a  wall in New York, a factory or a piece of industrial archaeology, on which the recognizable signs of an evident internationalism appear, documented in the written words: Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, South America, Hawaii.
For the artist, in Urban Lines the experience of the journey, considered as a cosmic and interior widening, interacts ceaselessly with that through the city of New York, seen not so much as documentary but rather a selection of examples which recognizably relate  to an artistic elaboration which makes them its own, filtering them through the language of video, the experiences of the visual arts.
The perspectives slide quickly through accelerations and slowing down of the rhythm; enlivened by vertical and horizontal shots passing quickly from the contour of the skyline of the city to the street signs of 23rd Street and 6h Avenue, only to sink soon after with the underground river of people swallowed up by the subway.
As has been said, the artist tries to give us the maximum quantity of sensations and information possible, synchronizing the images with the specially created music and the sounds recorded on site .The voice off announcement of the speaker of a subway station, blending with the music of the ghettobaster of a passenger of African origin clearly show us, following  a cinematographic model, the location of the action. Although the images for Urban Lines are mainly filmed in New York, the artist considers three urban realities. Here too the creation of a narrative development based on personal experience plays a part, where once more, the noise, or its absence, express the precise character of the various urban realities. If noise identifies the feverish agitation of one of the most important metropolises in the world, we see Marini use silence and the horizontal flowing of  images seen in transparency, to point out, through hearing  and vision, as in a fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the suspension of time of the by now mythical beauty of the town of Siena. However, the video-installation in question also extends the concept of the journey to a new destination. After the final images of New York and its awaking with a visual progression established in linear sequence, the symbolic insertion of a male figure running suggests the idea of a new journey, whose departure point, this time, is Rome. Here a slow progression of horizontal images of the Roman Forum and the “Altare della Patria”, filmed in the warm colours of a chromatic range reminiscent of the  Scuola romana, underpinned in the background by flowing sounds which created a sense of continuity between then and now, precisely shows the new location of  Urban Lines.
New horizons in Rome which may well later become the subject of further reflections. Marini in the closure of  her  video-installation indicates Rome as possible set for future journeys: for the moment they are mere notes jotted down briefly in the margin with this tracking shot of the city. The development of new exploratory stories centered on the capital are evidently still under construction.





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