January 11 – July 26 2020
Francesco Quadri solo exhibition
It’s the first time that I can talk about my paintings and describing them I can feel the emotion dominating my words and my art. My works have an instinctive origin which is far from a precise and organic meaning.
The movement of a pencil on a sheet of paper represented my first form of communication, before writing, maybe before speaking too. I remember the first subjects that grabbed my imagination: chickens. I do not remember at all what triggered the real stimulus to portray one of the most awkward feathered of the Earth, but certainly on the first attempt, then through the second and the third, a growing love was born in reproducing the things of the world.
The enthusiasm to duplicate and represent them has grown endlessly, often through irrationality. Only after many years experimenting, I began to give an order and a clear direction to my artworks. For this reason my first real exhibition was born, besides the intuition and generosity of Nicoletta Candiani, SAC’ owner and art curator, while putting together some paintings that belong to a common vision. The “Many” shows places, contexts, events in which the mass plays the leading role. There are countless individuals within a crowd, but the main protagonist is the crowd itself. The group, the mass, might cause the observer’ exaltation or terror, but it prevails anyway on individuals. Here is the fascination that leads me to portray situations of this type, contexts where so many souls and things can coexist, the so called “Many”.
Since I started my personal research for “Many”, I found very useful rigid, light and smooth supports, which allowed me to handle them easily, often working on the table, or holding the board directly on my knees (to enrich my orthopedist’s wallet), and the possibility of operating with various and different techniques. Last but not least, homogeneity and smoothness allow me to reach the most precise level of line detail. So the wooden boards, treated plywood, in particular the lamellar one, or the multifaceted and fascinating polyplat (which I prefer to call, for my aesthetic weakness, “reinforced paper”), represent excellent interfaces for my language.
I use different painting techniques according to the subject I paint. The ink, distributed by very thin markers (no more than 0.2 mm), constitutes the skeleton of each painting. In certain artworks watercolor shading helps me to represent threedimensionality. The acrylic is often used in dense and flat brush strokes to create full-color spaces on which the multitudes of “Many” stand out. An architecture of different materials that live together making the harmony that I have imagined in my mind and in my eyes real. The “Many” are conceived in motion, they are the transposition of cinematographic frames. Every single “Many” situation depicted represents virtual environments that I will capture in a film one day.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Francesco was born in 1989 in Bergamo, Italy. He graduated at the Art High School of Bergamo in 2008. He studied History of Cinema in Turin, graduating in 2012. In 2018 he graduated in directing and advertising production at the Experimental Center of Cinematography in Milan. At the same time he worked as a visualizer, storyboard-artist and illustrator. He currently lives and works in Milan, mainly as a director and advertising producer, at the same time he goes on with his pictorial and illustrator activity.