Giovanni Frangi, PASADENA

«Pasadena is a series of thirty engravings dedicated to the Huntington Botanic Garden, one of the most extraordinary reconstructions of natural environments in the world. They range from oriental gardens to desert plants, from water lily lakes to the Shakespeare Garden. I had taken about a hundred colour photos that time too, and I looked at them from time to time, but I didn’t think they would become my Japanese alphabet like the one in a book I had bought years ago in New York. I always had it around because it was a strange format: there were white letters on a black background that looked beautiful to me. When I discovered carborundum, the silicon powder used on top of hypodermic resin, I knew I needed to go back to Pasadena because those photos weren’t enough, I needed some detail, a piece of sky behind the plants that I was missing, but I haven’t gone back yet and the second time is never like the first.»
Giovanni Frangi

«In the foreground there is a large open space with pink patches. A few dark spots here and there, footprints or paw prints, indicate that the area is not uninhabited. But to break the silence, one can only imagine the whistles of marmots, which are crouching behind the trunks, like watchmen. Here, too, something violent may have happened, as there are blood-red spots in the centre. The scene is set for the brightest Erwartung of recent times. While there is fortunately no reason, either naturalistic or expressionist, for the splashes of blue amidst the snow; those at the top left could be a somewhat anaemic corner of the sky. On the trunks of these trees, once again traversed by the comb, drips, like rubber, the love for Morlotti: fresh from the day, however. So much so that if you look at them up close, these trunks of a thousand colours look like what is left of a box of ice cream at the end of a meal, when all the flavours go together. This is nature at its best: here you can hear the music of the landscape.»
Giovanni Agosti

THE ARTIST

Giovanni Frangi was born in Milan in 1959 where he lives and works. He studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. He started painting at a very early age. In 1983 he had his first solo exhibition at the La Bussola gallery in Turin. Over the years he has worked with various galleries in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, China and the United States. In 1997 he won the prize at the XII Quadriennale in Rome and exhibited La fuga di Renzo at the Camera dei Deputati in the Last Supper Hall. In 1999, at the Palazzo delle Stelline in Milan, he exhibited Il richiamo della foresta, a forest consisting of 13 canvases. In 2000 he began working with the Galleria dello Scudo in Verona, where he exhibited Viaggio in Italia in 2000, Take off in 2004 and Underwater in 2007. In 2004 he exhibited Nobu at Elba at the Stables of Villa Panza in Varese. In 2006 he mounted two View -masters at the Poggiali e Forconi Gallery in Florence. In 2007 he held the exhibition Sassisassi at the Raphael Gallery in Frankfurt. In 2008 he exhibited Pasadena for the first time at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Udine and created the installation Giovanni Frangi MT2425 in Bergamo, for the Oratorio di San Lupo.