Giovanni Frangi (Milan, 1959) presents one of his recent installations in the Corner room at the Maxxi, entitled Unwind the sails – a standard for Jonas. This intervention takes place in conjunction with the XII Jonas National Seminar which will be held at the Maxxi Auditorium from 9 to 11 May 2014
Massimo Recalcati, founder of the Jonas association, present in the major Italian cities with the aim of a psychotherapy at sustainable prices, has always had a special interest in the figurative arts and has followed the work of Giovanni di Frangi in recent years. In the volume The miracle of form. For a psychoanalytical aesthetic published by Mondadori he begins to write about Frangi's work and with a different gaze from the usual he has actively contributed to some of his recent exhibitions.
Frangi and Recalcati have thought of combining two apparently distant experiences but with strong elective affinities not only linked by their biography.
A note on Giovanni Frangi at Maxxi
Massimo Recalcati
“Two large canvases measuring six by three meters will be hung like sails on two iron beams in the center of the room…The canvases are sewn and the patch becomes part of the work…Recto and verso of two situations related to the last phase of my work in which the line of the landscape moves freely without a perspective centrality but as an acquisition of a line that flows almost without interruption creating the rhythm of the image…Around, resting on the floor, a series of sculptures made of foam rubber stand here and there in the room like fragments of archipelagos or small rocks…”. This is how Giovanni Frangi describes the pictorial and sculptural installation he built to celebrate the XII National Conference of Jonas Onlus at the Maxxi Corner.
Is nature torn to pieces, doubled, crumbled like the little black tarry rocks scattered on the floor? Torn like hanging sails? Reduced to the line drawing that follows the contours of the landscape? Is Frangi's gesture towards nature a nihilistic gesture?
No, certainly not. That's not what this is about. Here we find rather the most decisive poetic line of his work which is that of a body to body with nature and with the infinite that mysteriously dwells in it. As always, no abstract metaphysics. No discount to the hardness and fatigue of the figuration. But in this case the use of a poor material such as the mattress cloths or the foam rubber of the sculptures reveal a particular trait of this melee. If in Frangi we are used to seeing how all of nature, each of its fragments, is elevated, through the power of colour, to the dignity of the absolute, in this installation, rigidly in light and dark, the presence of a less evident ancestry is revealed which runs through his more classically neo-expressionist work on the figure promoted with great energy and variation of themes in all these years; it reveals the ancestry of art and, in particular, of Kounellis' rooms with hanging sails which, according to what the artist himself declares, constituted the first reference, the first free association, which set the project in motion. Arte Povera transforms the humblest materials into figures, into enigmatic icons full of meaning. Makes finite index of infinity. Transfigures the relic from the body of the saint to the body of nature and its multiple ways. Archipelagos, rocks, shreds, sails… The suggestion is not that caused by the intensity of the colour, but springs from the lyrical assemblage of materials and pictorial gestures. This nature does not wildly precede language but makes its irruption thanks to language in language. Black and white appear as the foundations of life and death. Opposites touching, two faces of the same sail: heaviness and lightness, night and day, dark and light. As happens in poor art in this installation, full of painting, the poverty of the material bares the finite dimension of our human condition. But, at the same time, it opens onto the mystery of a presence that never exhausts everything in what it is. Double face of the world, double sail of the world. Where presence is always, in principle, beyond presence. It is the function of the veil that psychoanalysts know well. Where every presence is always inhabited by an absence, always wide open – always – on elsewhere.
