The Art of Franca

Franca Fiorin, just Franchina for me and a few friends, is a delightful person, generous with no trace of naivety but intelligent and brilliant. Looking at his house everywhere one can find signs of her creativity, now all the pieces are exported in her office/showroom based in Rivalta to form a narrative path because people from Piacenza, “i Piacentini”, or “gli Emiliani” if we consider the people from Emilia, don’t conceive Art without a story. A great painter once said that catching friendship is like a contagion better than a choice. So Franca as Pino Ballerini did using sticks, tell us a story and we listen in silence, returned to our childlike state. The means; branches, trunks and an ancient scrub of dry leaves to be moved by rubbing your feet to accompany the music background. The theme; the circle of life, the dry leaves are the basis of the drama growing forming the various stages as Stations of the Cross, Pinocchio’s Tree, the serpent of money, obsession and so on, then ending with an evil central wooden plank that attracts you for its toothed mouth, but that immediately softens you with its red heart formed by a leaf. She says: “Art is a big word, I would get as close as possible”, for me Fiorin is good as Cattellan, frankly I find her less smart and more intelligent, do not confuse the artistic value with the commercial one; the latter is polluted by increasingly difficult economic powers (not of money but of motivations). But let’s do not finish this presentation so controversially, thanks to this exhibition we can enjoy i a moment of playful serenity offered by Franca, such that we can taste her work, result of hard won peace of mind.

Alberto Gallerati 10-03-2015