Mario Francesconi, S.B.

Room 11

I have been making Beckett portraits for over 10 years. Beckett together with Cèline and Giacometti is for me (and for many) one of the most interesting faces of the 20th century, where art, literature and poetry meet in an inscrutable and elusive synthesis. The image of the Irish playwright becomes more and more of an archetype, it becomes distant, dematerialised, and accentuates its elusiveness. This is why I chose a rigid material such as iron, which, although led by a skilful and synthetic design, tries to capture and fix the image, almost to imprison it within a mental grid, and then hand it down to us as an existential icon.
Mario Francesconi

You have managed to escape the superficial judgement of chronology and even more so the questions of style.
If you like, I will also tell you why: because you are a savage, you are the wildest artist I have ever met.
And I take offence when I see and hear about your work in an iconographic sense, my blood boils when I read useless quotations.Your art is “gesture”.
It is your gesture that leaves one breathless. It is the relationship between the gesture and the idea that are born together with you and in you, but that have an incestuous relationship with each other: they are father and daughter and one does not know where the other is going. They chase each other, they wait for tiny fractions of time, but you can never tell which of the two will prevail. In your gesture until the last moment you don’t know where you are going and the result is as unpredictable as it is surprising.
That’s why your pictures are punches in the stomach or clutches at the heart: they are announcements one doesn’t want to hear, they are “vanitas”, they are the farewell one would never want to hear from a loved one.
Edoardo Testori

Mario Francesconi was born in 1934 in Viareggio (LU), where he lives and works.