“Color“
Exhibit of photographs / from 20 February to 4 April 2015
“...Photography does not need to copy what is visible, but it should make visible what it is invisible.”
MONDO GALERIA presents for the first time in Madrid a solo exhibit by ‘the photographer of colour’: Franco Fontana (Modena, 1933). The photographs done by this prolific Italian artist show us his personal world, created in between the parameters imposed by the photographic lens. The colour composition is the first thing that strikes us from these images that create a non-chronological overlook of his oeuvre. In the 60’ Fontana constructs his imagery inside the rural Italian landscape and then he moves forward to Europe firs and to urban American landscape after that. Finally in the last decades he arrives to female body and later to classical sculpture that are what he photographs today. His work is part of the most important international collections including NY MOMA, Modern Art Museum of Paris or IVAM in Valencia
This exhibit is possible thanks to a collaboration with Sabrina Raffaghello Arte Contemporanea and the Instituto Italiano de Cultura in Madrid and brings to us the works of a photographer who creates a photographic discourse that didn´t exist before him. Mastering the elements offered by photography to distort the world, Fontana creates a series of abstract landscapes (at the beginning) and stories filled with emptiness (later) moving us to an imaginary space in between the literature of the American novelist Raymond Carver and the theorist lucubration by Italo Calvino.
Casual but elaborated compositions, soft brush strokes of what we all have in front and just a few see is what fills this works with a familiarity full of sophistication. The nicest thing in his work is that complex things appear as easy, and the abstract thought enters our eyes as never before full of figures.
About Franco Fontana
Born in Modena in 1933. He began photographing in ‘61 and his first solo shows were in Turin in ‘65 and in Modena in ‘68.
This last exhibition marks a turning point in his research: in the practice of photography he began inventing his own language, closely balancing abstraction and the everyday pragmatism which is typical of his native land. He attempts to reconcile macrocosm and microcosm as his contemplative subjects. «Fontana has been able to generate “the photographic colour” without transferring its sign as idea» (A.C. Quintavalle). He has published over 40 books in Italian, Japanese, French, German, Swiss, American and Spanish editions, and has exhibited in over 400 solo and group exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world.
His works are present in 50 international public collections including MoMA (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (Torino).
He has received numerous awards including the Cologne Photokina (1974), the appointment of Master Photographer from the Italian FIAF (1995) and the honorary degree in ecofriendly Product Design (2006, Faculty of Architecture, Polytechnic of Turin).
He signed many advertising campaigns (Canon, Railways, Fiat, Robe di Kappa, Snam, Sony, Volkswagen and Volvo, Versace, Kodak).
He held conferences and workshops abroad (Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tokyo Institute of Technology Academy of Brussels, University of Toronto) and in several Italian cities. He has collaborated with magazines and newspapers such as Time-Life, Vogue USA and Vogue France, Venerdì (La Repubblica), Sette (Corriere della Sera), Panorama, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Epoca, Class, New York Times.
He is Artistic Director of the Toscana Foto Festival, and he collaborated with the Centre Pompidou and the Ministries of Culture of France and Japan.
In 2011 he is invited in the Biennale of Alessandria with a solo project “Vita Nova” and in the Biennale of Venice in Italian Pavilion by the curator Vittorio Sgarbi.
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