Franco Margari’s illuminations

    During the last decade of the twentieth century Franco Margari of Florence made a name for himself as a painter, and not only at regional level. During the last five years his qualified attendances with personal and group exhibits have remarkably boomed in a number of galleries, exhibit centres, fairs and contests. And this was not due to an accidental coincidence but the credit is to be given to Margari’s fundamental and progressive artistic transformation which led him more and more towards abstraction.

     His canvas, enriched by a phantasmagoric range of colours (from cold blues, turquoises and emerald greens to burning reds, yellows and fuchsias) do not reach the informal but maintain a solid graphic substrate originated by his strengthened training in the field of the drawing and the figure. A quality, which is indispensable also for those artists who, with their work, put a distance from recognizable and prospectively built forms. His abstract forms, drawn with the colour’s materically crinkled and tormented plastic (coming sometimes from the remote late-Gothic echoes of Matthias Grünewald’s German painting or from Georges Rouault’s modern “signs”), are painted with resolution by means of wide and fast brush strokes that draw broken lines and primary elements, often elementary crystal dihedrons disassembled and shattered in a sort of vital explosions. But it is the light, a white and pure light as dreamed by the Humanism to intervene for shaping and modifying the inert matter. There, then, ‘divine’ blades and swords fall from above, cosmogonal matrix at the dawn of the world setting those rutilant dihedrons to fire, now, rainbow’s primary colours, in a breakdown of the mother-light irradiating within that very same matter, rendering it “intelligent” and at the same time almost dissolving it or liberating it of its “weight”.

     In these Crystals of life, in these Apparitions of the First Thought, almost through the Genesis of the World, a concept art is expressed to dig the human psyche and its most hidden meanders through sounding modern people’s existential implications by sensing relevant finalities and limits, without tragedies, by means of poetical and almost “prophetical” inspirations.

     The matter’s forming up and disintegrating and reassembling close-ups within the eternal game of the life under the vital breath of self-consciousness and intellect do dilate onto an actually abstract scenery but that in the dark of the Night or in the radiant light of the Day let us imagine skies and horizons, oblique expanses of uncontaminated seas (sources of life) or of snowy and irregular mountains hardly climbed by man during his constant aspiration to ascend.

     If the human figure never appears in these fringed and iridescent materic forms that imprint in the internal cosmos almost a stunning dynamism to the mass’ static nature, yet nevertheless it is man to pivot these lightening visions, revealing himself in all his fragile reality and disclosing utopian hidden islands.

     A painting made of energies, of disputes and universal balances where the human microcosm reflects in the macrocosm; the eternal timeless question of ancient and classical matrix is rendered through the use of the non-formed-form and of the colour, a use in which the Artist has learnedly assimilated the most important modernisms (starting from Cubism), resolutely devoting himself to the way shown by the Italian post-war abstraction of the 50’s and 60’s, from Afro to Mattioli also keeping in mind the definite Pop Art’s colourfulness and the psychological themes of the Trans-advance-guard to reach this way the unexplored shores of the twenty-first century.

                                                                                                             Giampaolo Trotta.
 

e-mail : francomargari@hotmail.it