Franco Passalacqua

Even though Franco Passalacqua’s works can quite rightly be related to a whole history of works by artists obsessed by the ‘module’, one thing in particular distinguishes him from most of the others: a painting by him, however ‘abstract’, cannot be hung upside down. This might seem a minor or even frivolous point, but it does indicate an essential part of his painting: its formal rigour and its strong internal rhythms not only tie the surface together and make it solid, but they impose a direction, a top and bottom, a way of reading the pictures that we cannot escape from. And this would be true even without those delicate brushstrokes, that balance of dark but subtle colours, suddenly lit up by flashes of orange or acid greens… Because both these aspects are nothing other than elements coming together in a strategy to involve us in the deep humanity of this world without human figures. The abstract rhythms, the solid structure, but also those brushstrokes that show us the hand that created and almost caressed them, allow us to rediscover a stable world even though one swept by winds, by renewal and decay, a world in all its insecure security: not naturalistic but perhaps all too natural. (see biography)