Alec Franco
El color no está en las cosas
May 12 to June 12, 2022
Curator: Gabriel Palumbo
Curatorial text
“When color has its richness, form has its fullness”
Paul Cézanne
Like very few things in life, color has the enormous power of unsolved mysteries. We will never know how much those who claim to love us, just as we cannot know what each of us sees when we see a color.
This enigma of intimacy has been addressed from philosophy, from optics, even from history. Everyone has made some substantive contribution and some have come to contribute with a certain beauty on the matter.
But it is the painters who have the key, perhaps because they know that color is neither in nature, nor in things, nor even in their own palettes and workshops, but is created and recreated in the ability to link the people with the world. It is in that encounter where color acquires its symbolic capacity and becomes, above all, a meaning. When an artist manages to decipher, intuitively or intellectually, that enigma, he becomes a magician.
Alec Franco’s work does that job with powerful serenity. His expression, which often seems to have violent and violent genetics, is softened by the great communication skills of his color management. He creates the illusion by mixing color and emptiness, expansion and containment, and that becomes amazing because it creates an effect before we even realize it. In some of his paintings Franco works as if trying to untangle an emotional skein. Like Delacroix with his basket of colored wool, he tries to combine them to find the right tone that also allows the shape to appear. In his large canvases, it seems that the figures are trying to escape from the plane, but the composition is so precise that the viewer will never feel that the painting is unbalanced or dispersed. The play between abstraction and a diffuse figurative vibration that Franco manages returns to the viewer significant sovereignty over the work. In his work, the axiom according to which the work is only completed when it finds reception takes on a renewed dimension. In both the large and smaller pieces, in the fabrics and papers displayed in the gallery, the breadth of representations that are enabled are only limited by the viewer’s imagination.
With The Color Is Not in Things, Alec Franco then performs a double operation. On the one hand, he promotes life experience from the light, as if knowing that its lack enables bad things. It is no secret to anyone that lack of color and uniformity are symptoms of authoritarian societies and eclipsed experiences. As John Ruskin described to reinforce his personal commitment to color; Death, night and all pollution are colorless. On the other hand, Alec Franco’s paintings, or rather his work, are in that particular, persistent and necessary search to find and found what Félix de Azúa calls chromatic legend. It is the imperative and fair task of finding that color that generates new worlds, that throws into experience something that does not yet exist.
Gabriel Palumbo
May 2022
