Gesture, Form and Colour

“Colour provokes a psychic vibration”, wrote Wassily Kandinsky in the chapter on The language of form and colour in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910). This “vibration” can also be found in the works of Francesco Carozza: it is a spiritual tension, the pure power of colour and material.
Francesco’s style is instantly recognisable. His paintings, simple in their immediacy, conceal the artist’s unceasing exploration and connection with the international pictorial tradition of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Francesco’s approach is ritualistic, almost obsessive. His creative gestures are reiterated on each canvas, in a constant search for the repetition and variation of the elements of painting: gesture, form and colour.
Repetition and variation are also key concepts in 20th-century architecture and art. Think how important it was for the exponents of Pop Art, whose paintings explore the ever-present tension between the potential of reproduction without limits and the uniqueness of the works, which can never be repeated. In the same way, Francesco Carozza reproduces a formal schema, using the same movements but creating unique works that not even the artist himself can repeat, as they are the result of an artistic process that is partially determined by chance.

COLOUR

Perhaps the real hero in Francesco Carozza’s paintings is colour. Bright, brilliant, and captivating, it draws the attention of the observer, luring them in. Since his early compositions in 2018 through to his most recent work, Francesco has embarked on a ceaseless study of the potential and perceptual possibilities of colour and all its pairings.
In his paintings, he superimposes colour on monochrome backgrounds, playing on chiaroscuro contrasts (white/black; white/blue), on the relationship between matte and satin finishes (pearl white/black) and on the contrast between primary or secondary colours and metallic tones (red/gold, magenta/silver). He even experiments with fluorescent pigments that glow when exposed to UV light, or dichroic colours that vibrate between two complementary tones (pink/yellow-green) as the observer moves.
For Francesco Carozza, the study of colour is multifaceted: he carefully observes his surroundings to capture their hues and tones, drawing inspiration for his new creations. He commits to memory the tonal pairings seen in nature, in the artificial world (from exotic wildlife to motor cars) and in graphics, design or fashion. Francesco interiorises these visual inspirations in digital photographs, using the same technique adopted throughout history by painters who would keep journals to record glimpses of real life that they would then re-elaborate and recompose on canvas, once back in the studio.
He prefers “psychedelic” colours taken from the world of advertising and the teachings of Pop Art, but in its broader global definition, which spans several generations starting with the artists born in the 1920s such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Yayoi Kusama, through to the proponents who emerged during the Nineties, including Damien Hirst, Marc Quinn and Takashi Murakami.

GESTURE

The artist’s creative manuality is impressed on the body of the canvas; it marks the rhythm of the medium, emphasising and outlining the forms and patterns of his compositions. His manual technique is what gives texture to the colour; it is crystallised in the copious layers of acrylic pigment with a slow, curving movement, elongated and interrupted, hinting at the use of spatulas and kitchen utensils to apply the colour.
This is a ritual expressive gesture that Francesco repeats on each canvas, forming an indissoluble bond with each of his creations. It is a technique mindful of past artistic traditions from East and West, and one that pays tribute to the Art Informel movement in Europe and America.
It is an expressive gesture that wants to go beyond the boundaries of the canvas, breaking its bi-dimensionality, and it does so thanks to the bond it forges with colour and form in each painting. Francesco is seeking a connection between the space on the canvas and the space around the canvas, following the tradition started by Lucio Fontana and explored by a number of Italian artists from the 1960s including Paolo Scheggi, Enrico Castellani, Piero Manzoni and Agostino Bonalumi. In Francesco’s own words, Lucio Fontana, who he considers the greatest innovator of the 20th century, “overturned the concept of relationship between canvas and colour: before Fontana, painters just used the canvas as a background for the colour, which through the artist’s brush strokes created the forms, turning it into a work of art. In doing so, he generated a new concept of art, subverting the dialogue between the canvas and the space, using his ‘cuts’ in a new conceptual framework in which surface and colour take on a new role”.
In Francesco’s work, the dense paint on the surface changes as it dries, sometimes creating unpredictable “cracks”. While on the one hand he exerts strong command over his creations by repeating the manual technique, on the other, the end result is defined by chance. This is even more true of his most recent works entitled Onirico V, in which the acrylic overlies the velvet.

FORM

Most of Francesco Carozza’s works are dominated by circles, although irregular and with ragged edges. In the artist’s early compositions from 2018-2019, the circle is often elongated and deformed, almost an “opening”, while in the recent paintings the circle multiplies from one (Onirico 0), to two (Onirico 1) and then four (Onirico 3).
Francesco did not choose this shape; it came to him unconsciously in a dream, hence the title to these works (“Oneiric”, or “dreamlike”, in English). As the artist himself tells us, he only decided to pursue this career after a nocturnal vision showed him the paintings he would later create.
If we interpret this in the light of modern psychoanalysis, we might find a few connections with the history of the artist. For example, Carl Gustav Jung believed the circle had a strong symbolic value: it represents the self, the form through which a human being can recognise himself, protected from external attack.
But since ancient times the circle has had a far greater power, in almost every culture. The circle is not just the Self. It is also the Absolute, the Everything. Perfection and harmony. It symbolises eternal movement and the ceaseless regeneration of the universe.