Ettore Frani, RESPIRI

Room 22

Placing the body inside the soul and not vice versa.
Not the work in the room but the room within the work, an interweaving of depth and surface, an osmotic exchange between the visceral and the atmospheric.
Freeing up openings, in the hope that the work can accommodate the vestiges of this epiphany.
An indecipherable language leaks out from the silent walls, and the work becomes an ear, a shell caressed by the foam on the sand.
Time is an anointing that gushes and dries.
Touch time with your eyes, the silence hanging on the walls.
The image must breathe with them, become a mysterious threshold.
In the breath there is something that continually returns and vanishes, an anadiomena movement that suggests and does not show.
What remains hidden is greater than what is exhibited.
Breath knows no distinction between external and internal, between mine and yours, between individual and universal.
In the breath there is contagion, crossing, oozing, interstitial humour between the skin of the work and the clothes of the room.
Six works to preserve and reveal what cannot be shown.
There are only remains, small survivals that the work attempts to trace.
A living heart warms the whites, and the surface turns out to be a receptacle of expectation and desire.
Ettore Frani

Frani’s poetics confirm itself above all as a poetics of the veil and of waiting. He knows how to interrogate the surface of the canvas and the surface of the world because he can see the depth that is implicit in it. It is in the surface that the painting and the world are given. But, as Nietzsche said, it would be completely naive to think that the surface is superficial in itself, that is, opposed to the true being of the world, as a transient and secondary part compared to the substantial centrality of the essence. No, Frani works on the surface, placing in the surface the mystery of the world, its unlimited contingency.
His whites are the result of multiple, meticulous, lyrical and, at the same time, insistent and dogged layers of colour. The peace he achieves at the end of the work is obtained through tenacious work. His white is by no means a starting point. He does not start from the surface, but reaches it. His whites are thus always populated by spots, shadows, presences, small incisions, imperceptible excavations, discontinuous densities on a background that is only apparently homogeneous. His monochrome effort revolves in a privileged way around the oscillation of absence into presence and vice versa. Frani constructs his whites through painting and in this construction elevates the surface to the dignity of a mystery.
The veil does not cover the essence, it does not conceal the mystery, it does not hide the world. The veil is the world; there is no world without the veil. The mystery of the world is one with the mystery of the veil.
Massimo Recalcati

Ettore Frani was born in Termoli (CB) in 1978. He lives and works in Rome.