TÊTE-À-TÊTE

About

The exhibition of the works of Giovanni De Francesco and David Casini between painting and sculpture, explores the meanings of a concept that unfolds between essence and appearance, reality and fiction.

The exhibition puts in confrontation, and in dialogue, two artists with a different style, but with a common language, one characterized by a hypotrophic sculpture, flooded with color, the other by the process of abstraction and decomposition of the image, crystallized in icy and seductive geometries.

It is on the basis of these different meanings that the two artists move.

The powerful work - documented by plasters and pigments - by DE FRANCESCO, belongs to a contemporary storyteller, whose fairy tales are complex conceptual eddies that unfold at many thematic and spatial levels, in which brightly colored masks observe him intensely and incongruous characters, busy and with mysterious activities, they are placed in unstable equilibrium and in precipitating perspectives. A pictorial stage in which people and masks act.

The references range from comics to sculpture of the 1950s, from history to theatre, to children’s imagination, because DE FRANCESCO is an image storer, a serial accumulator of visual stimuli.

CASINI metabolizes and reconfigures some traditional forms, he amplifies the conceptual scope, showing the rarefaction of matter in a mental dimension that delineates the essential elements of reality. Nature and art history are thus absorbed and returned to delineate fragile microcosms, in which the past and the future converge in a suspended spacetime capable of generating empathy. Made of different materials - crystal, metal, inlaid wood, plexiglass, digital ultraviolet prints, organic and mineral elements, resin and wax molds - the elements are locked and suspended within the sculpture's space according to precise perspective geometries, dialoguing with each other in an alienating, enigmatic, almost surreal way. The result is a composition that is almost a still life, sometimes kept and protected by a glass box that is, at the same time, a container and a sculptural structure.

In some simple elements, the artists' compositions gently revive the dialogue between past and present, inviting us to pay attention to the details and devote time to a slower looking.