“[…] Understanding Francesca Guetta’s innate need to express gives us the lens with which to view the Omaggio al Futurismo series and her latest experiments with material art. The former, a unique aesthetic reinterpretation in which well placed rhythms, far removed from the explosion of lines and anachronistic dynamism, merge with graphic elements and found objects (often originals), that recall one of the most interesting historical periods of our nation, as well as the only historical Avant-garde that is uniquely Italian.”
BARBARA ANGIOLINI
“Arte Povera, New Dada and immense creativity drive the Florentine Guetta to examine the history and culture of art. Over the past few months she has concentrated on Michelangelo’s intensity and the futuristic ardor. Both subjects fulfilled through an intensity of materials and colors, and the incisiveness of collage. And that’s where Guetta reaches intense compositions, an extra spark.” (“La Libertà” of Piacenza, the “Cultura e Spettacoli” column, 29 March 2012, for the exhibition in “La Spadarina” gallery.)
FABIO BIANCHI
“From Francesca Guetta we have the piece A proposito del Caffè. Her choice falls on various materials that recall recyclables, the jute bags in an old coffee pot and some coffee beans. But also references to the arts, to the work whose plasticity is enhanced by the color green that covers much of the piece. A search for nature, for the elements, and for their essence which is reflected in the written word, the expression of a pop art piece, yet significant in its content and its meanings.” (Il Caffè e l’Arte, IV International Competition “Il Caffè e l’Arte”, Milan, 29 September – 13 October 2012, “Galleria degli Artisti”)
LIDIA SILANOS
“This composition, dedicated to the genius of art, the great Michelangelo, could not have been anything other than effective and authentic, having been conceived and created by the Florentine artist who possesses in her genes and pores the energy of Buonattori. The colors move between the classic and the contemporary, between the clarity and precision of this reality and the nuances of the past, in a piece that is fundamentally informal. The hand that sculpts is a human action guided by the divine, where time and space become the moment, the eternal […] expressing itself as a look of wonder, shifting from the basic to the specific. Michelangelo himself, before completing the Giudizio Universale (The Last Judgment), the culmination of his life’s work, wrote ‘But what can I do, Lord, if you do not come to guide me?’” (exhibition “Colori in concerto – dalla Toscana e dalla Liguria un inno al colore,” 2012, certificate of artistic merit for the painting Omaggio a Michelangelo III)
POMPEA VERGARO
“The artist, skilled in painting techniques, enhances the art of representation to give value to her own emotions. Il Caffè is a work of art created with mixed media on canvas. Through a skilful working of assemblage and collage the artist, using very few elements, evokes an objective reality constructed with great sensitivity to color. One may find an echoing of pop art through the explicit reference to the phenomenon of communication: the use of cartoons, of the coffee maker, of coffee as an industrial product of mass consumption; as well as the futuristic collage in which the sorrounding reality enters the painting through visual narratives that bring the onlooker in a world in which it is still okay to dream. Guetta wants to emphasize the desire for fair trade, in which the primary objective is not to maximize profit, but the fight against exploitation and poverty. A profound message. Exquistitely modern.” (A proposito del caffè, catalog of “Festival delle Belle Arti e della Cultura del XXI secolo,” Museo Bellini, Florence, Publications of La Rosa dei Venti, 2013)
DANIELE RADINI TEDESCHI
“Each painting conveys a message through an innovative artistic language centered on colors and, at times, mixed media collage. In this regard, considerable importance fills the series of the Omaggi. The many panels dedicated to Michelangelo honor the “not yet seen,” taking advantage of a unique and highly recognizable style, in a collage of prints and coarse rope that invokes both the manual labor and the artistic touch. It is the artist herself who questions her work; a meta-language used by Art to talk about itself, inspired by the great master of eclecticism. In other collages, however, small ready-made models become suggestive symbols naïve of historical contexts. A relentless search to explore without reservation, leaving the mind free to surpass the horizon of what has ‘already been seen’, to arrive at new sensations and evocative intimate or shared emotions […]” (Omaggi a Michelangelo e Omaggi al Futurismo, Un’eccellenza italiana,a virtual exhibit uploaded on “3D Art Gallery” on Youtube from 2013)
LETIZIA LANZAROTTI
“Francesca Guetta offers an example of a paradisiacal transformation in the ‘pagan’ sense with her book Paradiso … forse, a critical work that remains conceptually wary in which the Empyrean is dealt a blow in his materiality: cotton balls in place of clouds, coffee (Lavazza) like in the T.V. commercials, classical music as the harmony of the spheres, cigarettes as a relaxing vice and therefore ‘heavenly’ […]” Paradiso … forse, “Esposizione Triennale di Arti Visive,” Rome 2014, Tiltestetica, catalog curated by D. Radini Tedeschi, Editorial by Giorgio Mondadori, 2014)
DANIELE RADINI TEDESCHI
“What distinguishes and characterizes the work of Francesca Guetta is ‘a willingness’ to field a research that is capable of developing an integration of aspects of material culture with the sensitivities of the properties of objects, constantly in relation to the unavoidable fact of the epiphenomenal reference. With these features that are intended not only as a horizon of creative practice strongly committed to the façade of the formal definition, Francesca Guetta’s paintings become a moment of intersection between structural organization and subjective sensitivity. It seems advisable to also draw attention to the chromatic fullness that presents itself as an internal brightness produced by flickering of colors, a chromatic fullness that appears to be supported by an effectively placed composition, which must be seen not merely in terms of aesthetic appeal, but above all else for the substance of its content.” (the series Omaggio a Michelangelo,” from the exhibition brochure, “Anacapri” gallery, Capri, 2014)
ROSARIO PINTO
“Francesca Guetta loves to surprise herself and her audience with her innate propensity for novelty and experimentation with techniques and materials. She puts herself to the test by confronting challenges that are always more intriguing and fascinating than the last. This time she draws inspiration from collage to play with visions and musings gleaned from the eternity of the imaginary and the absurd that color Alice’s experience in her wonderland. A proposito di Alice is a work in which branches protrude from the vibrantly colored background and seem to break free from the heart of the piece transformed by the sensitivity of the artist in a stack of books arranged as steps in a strange, surrealistic ladder. Alice’s hands hold open the last book from the ladder with pages from which musical notes from a score have escaped to become the melodies of guitar strings. A dreamy, imaginative, surreal composition in which Guetta brings us to the understanding and representation of ‘the Beyond’, a work in which the author uses yet again the technique of collage and the vivacity of acrylics. The intense composition is extremely effective in portraying the two opposite worlds of which the central female figure is the protagonist. Dull, dreary, dark, and suffocating like a cage is the world she seems to escape from, imagination and color being the coveted prizes of her flight to freedom, towards her ‘beyond.’ The search seems to be the leitmotif of the artist’s world, and this time her search leaves us to enjoy the simple freedom that takes on life in an interior sanctuary made of little things, of vivid colors, and of cherished childhood memories. Her dream is one of a deep blue, illuminated by yellow from a cardboard sun that shines on painted flowers while butterflies and little toy airplanes fly through the air. Francesca Guetta offers an appraiser of art a spontaneous, kaleidoscopic and versatile work created with great skill and a sensitive vitality.” (Oltre and A proposito di Alice, catalogo Ars Gratia Artis, L’Arte per l’Arte,” Precis Arte Edizione, 2014)
CARLA GRASSANO
“Francesca Guetta’s piece entitled Omaggio a Michelangelo III is based on a construct in which Michelangelo’s words are placed into an abstract context and joined with the three primary colors. It deals with a cultured message that insinuates a sense of devout belonging to an immeasurable tradition with which every Italian artist must inevitably and humbly confront. A freshly inventive contrast between dynamic bands of color and the unique characteristics of sculptural forms” (expertise for Omaggio a Michelangelo III)
PAOLO LEVI
“A proposito del caffè, by Francesca Guetta, is a mixed media piece about an issue to contemplate- the spread of consumer goods in our times. The assembly of the figurative elements, a burlap sack of coffee beans and the parts of a coffee maker on a monochromatic green background, gives a setting for a compositional narrative that evokes the unbridgeable economic and social distance between our world and the Third World.” (expertise for A proposito del caffè)
PAOLO LEVI
“Omaggio alle Giubbe Rosse by Francesca Guetta is a work of mixed media that takes us back to an important moment in Florentine culture in the early Twentieth Century. The name of the title derives from the café where the intellectuals associated with the magazine “Lacerba,” lead by Giovanni Papini, would congregate. The use of quotes is quite timely with the iconographic references of the era and on the cultural imagination of modernity. The author thus composes a sort of commemorative fresco with a captivating visual force.” (expertise for Omaggio alle Giubbe Rosse )
PAOLO LEVI
“This work entitled Omaggio al Futurismo by Francesca Guetta is representative of an Italian artistic season among the most important of the first half of the last century. In a construct of geometric abstraction played out on the primary colors, the authors of Futurism appear to be arranged in perfect formal chromatic harmony. In plain view it is a classic advertising elaboration by Fortunato Depero.” (expertise for Omaggio al Futurismo)
PAOLO LEVI
“Francesca Guetta’s Omaggio a Michelangelo XI is a mixed-media piece that echoes a theme expressed in a Michelangelo quotation. The context is formed on an abstract geometric installation in which the collage of images and written pages is the cultured pretext for reflection on the museum of Italian art history. Extremely appealing is the use of primary colors that accompany the fragments of drawings and paintings, breaking them down into a very effective visual phantasmagoria.” (expertise for Omaggio a Michelangelo XI)
PAOLO LEVI
Criticism written by Giampaolo Trotta inserted in the exhibition catalogue “Il segno della memoria” (The memory sign), 2nd Edition, Limonaia of Villa Vogel, Florence. Francesca Guetta is a complex artist, and it would be downgrading to simply define her a “painter”. Moreover her masterpieces are executed on canvas paperboard mounted on a board. In fact, they are showing an articulated layering and juxtaposition of materials, even three-dimensional, in such a way that we can talk about real “pictosculpture”. In terms of colors and gesture signs, inside her pictures, the reminiscence to Pop Art, either of Italian or American source, as well as what was defined the European answer to the American folk art, namely the Nouveau Réalisme born under the governance of Pierre Restany and in particular the one interpreted by Arman with its “accumulations “. There are, however, substantial differences, which are leading Guetta’s art to an absolute originality, as I already had a chance to mention on another occasion. As we know, the movement originated in France in the sixties, took again the ready-made Dadaist concept, namely that of an everyday already made object, isolated from its functional context and elevated by an artist to artwork only through new contextualization. In Arman, who happily called himself “un peintre qui fait de la sculpture” (a painter that only does sculpture), the insertion of destroyed objects meant to express the absurd engagement of consumerism, which makes anything, that is pragmatically no longer needed, losing its value. Guetta, instead, uses only some “ reused “ objects and sometimes recovered from forgotten corners of dusty attics, but always closely related to the theme she wants to deal with and never real “ accumulations “ of almost undifferentiated disused objects, broken and devoid of value and meaning, from recovered up to a dignity and symbolic and artistic significance. Her artwork – highly conceptual and always linked to social and universal themes – is a real cathartic path of cultural self-consciousness that the artist follows. It possesses a leading thread through which the author wants us to think about deep realities. A realistic and disenchanted vision – Francesca Guetta’s one – but not pessimistic under an existential point of view, always veiled by an auroral hope. This is not contradicted, even not on this occasion. The hereby presented installation – Never Again – already exhibited (with variations) in Rome, is illustrated by a “ picture “ embedded in a highly symbolic and evocative setting, made for fragments of “ things “ that illuminate the memory. As for her habit, the square canvas that is dominating the center of the stage, is entirely covered with a collage of vintage photos: in the central strip of the picture we can see the railway entrance of Auschwitz and a train wagon assigned to the transport of Jews; on the left and right sides, photos taken from the famous KZ Bildbericht aus fünf Konzentrationslagern (Pictures report of five concentration camps) a little notebook in German language printed by the Allied, with results of the first inspections conducted by Allied troops in the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Belsen, Gardelegen, Nordhausen and Ohrdruf. In that time, this was made to awaken the consciences of all those Germans who could not or didn’t want to see the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Nowadays, this means a warning sign of an alert memory so that this will Never happen Again. Finally, in the center, the infamous list of the Jewish population to be cancelled across Europe, compiled by Adolf Eichmann for the Wannsee Conference of 1942, where the “final solution of the Jewish question” was clearly planned. Down, on the left side, the picture of the original Diary of Anna Frank, still exhibited in the Museum-House of Anna Frank in Amsterdam, turned yellow over the time, is emerging from the sharp black and white previous pictures. In the murky swirl of memories that squeezes man like inside an unsustainable nightmare, inside the “ black “ suffocating pessimism, however, here at the top, always on the left side, the photo of the inscription in three language, at the entrance of the “Garden of the Righteous” in the Museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is “exploding“ as a flashlight. This Garden opened in 1960 at the behest of Moshe Bejski, one that was saved by Oskar Schindler. With this, Francesca Guetta, as a sign of hope and light, wished to remind us that not everybody, in that time, pretended not to see and not to know. But there were also some of them that, at the risk of their own live, would help Jews, indeed the Righteous among the Nations. As for her habit, Guetta is enriching the artwork in a three dimensional way with almost neodadaist objects, but, as it has been pointed out previously, not random and out of context, meaning with significances far away from New Dada and Arman Réalisme. Recovering formally – albeit with variations – that icon reconstruction photo that became well-known and so much reproduced since year 2000 concerning the Holocaust Memorial Day, on the above mentioned collage (almost a laminated wall, a playlist of “ posters “ that are overlapping, from the distant echoes of what was the European take off and mostly known as the Rotella’s experiences), Guetta is laying on a typical lager prisoners dirty worn out and torn shirt (despite being a reproduction). Two elements on that shirt (a squeezed bas-relief, unlike other “ accumulations “ of hers, concerning canvas objects, which are really full-relief). The first one is the typical yellow fabric Jewish internees star, stitched on the shirt, in its variant with the red triangle of political prisoners, and with the “I” letter in reference to Italian nationality of the symbolic Jew. The second is a handwritten transcription, on a fragment of canvas then sewn on the tunic, from a poem by Primo Levi posted as a preface to his book “If this is a man” (see the text in Appendix). Four horizontal rows of authentic and gleaming barbed wire are “ nailing “ the tunic – a chromatic point without nuance of absolute geometry, which refers to 20th century Avant-garde and that lightens the canvas and focuses in blood-red pointed triangle of the above mentioned star, and imprisoning the canvas itself and wrapping up in the tormenting swirl of the past, with formal recalls – but only formal – to the ropes , themselves real too, that “are binding “ some paintings of Guetta in the series of Tributes to Michelangelo, ropes that, in this case, are tightening the paintings in deep tension and spiritual relationships, strong and proud as the temperament of the Renaissance Maestro and, at the same time, are defining relationships and balances, lines of flight and perspectives that are the basis of Renaissance Mannerism. As pointed out by the artist, resuming a typically Jewish tradition, “I decided to insert stones on the floor to reaffirm the concept of remembrance: we remember what happened, we make sure that the memory is present, that we do speak”. The “stones of remembrance” are also representing – physically and symbolically – a white spot of light as opposed to the leaden and absolute black of the seabed. A black cloth seabed, in fact, is receiving the canvas and is extending as well to the floor, where the installation is set up, consisting of a rough bench – placed to remember the extremely poor concentration camp dorm furniture – and the red and flaming gas bottle (with the words “Never Again“, lightly black pop fonts within a white circle), on which hangs a gas mask. All this because the installation wants to be dynamic, meaning the visitor must not only be “ observer “, but, if he wants it, he can take the gas mask, wear it, sit on the bench, observe from “ inside “ and meditate, protected by the gas mask, that is alluding too – like the reference to the Garden of the Righteous – to the beyond hope of the “ funereal “ remembrance which, if deprived from glows towards a future that calls for better , risks to become rhetoric and eventually sterile. On the bench – as a distinguishing mark of her individual memory, but that becomes then universal – the author is laying down the radio that already belonged to grandfather Guetta and used by him when he hid from the Germans because he was Jewish, to listen to the hope of Radio London. The installation, finally, expands sideways with a series of luggage of that time – more important and more humble, to remind us that not all Jews were rich, as a false stereotype would have us believe – which is witnessing that last one way trip. So, between color spot flashes and sharp triangles and barbed wires of torment, among fragments of thoughts and writings which become immortal memory icons, between tears of tunics from people reduced to a vegetative state and rough “walls” of black and white photos, which welcome the reset and the resurrection of the human soul, with its fears, deep as the abyss of a paralyzing nightmare and with its bright intuitions of hope, Francesca Guetta takes us back to the concreteness of reality without rhetoric, somewhere between reflection, remembrance and hope, observing with no feelings of emasculating revenge what has been the biggest genocide in human history.
Among Michelangelo, Balla and Depero, Sipping the Coffee of Life The works of Francesca Guetta on display in this exhibition at the “Casa di Dante” in Florence have a comprehensive layering and juxtaposition of materials – some three-dimensional – and become true works of “pittosculture,” inserted between small but significant installations which help to reinforce the central theme. In her paintings there is an obvious reference to Italian Pop Art and, above all, what has been defined as the European response to American popular art, namely the Nouveau Réalisme, particularly that which was interpreted by Arman with his ‘accumulations.’ There are, however, substantial differences, which, as we have already discovered in her other shows, give Guetta’s art a quality of absolute originality. The artist, in fact, employs only a few particular objects closely related to the theme that she wishes to develop; she never relies on truly undifferentiated ‘accumulations.’ Her work is a real journey of cultural self-awareness carried out by the artist and possesses a common thread through which the author seeks to inspire us to reflect on a deeper reality. The theme of the mixed media pieces of the first group exhibited here is that of coffee with its varied economic and social meanings. Through fragments of jute sacks, coffee beans, coffee grinders and old mocha machines, artfully arranged on the green or earthy red “carpet”, Francesca Guetta makes us reflect on the possibility of fair trade marketing. This interpretation is supported by the written comments that, from an outward perspective, convey the pop art comic tradition. At the same time, the interpretation is emphasized through the symbolism of the production chain that moves the product from the countries of origin to our own table, materialized in a type of completely secular ‘rosary’ made of roasted coffee beans. She offers an underlying plea to escape the deranged mechanisms of globalizing consumerism, to regain our individuality, without haste, in a context of simple things that can give us peace of mind and the possibility of not being sucked into the whirlpool of numerous urgent commitments which are not actually that important but often overwhelm us. A possible “Paradise” on Earth (sometimes “captured” in surreal compositions) achieved “simply” by sipping a good cup of coffee, perhaps Neapolitan or from the old Artusi recipes, or replaying parts of a song or some Italian pop music that share theese references of coffee and the baggage of bitter-sweet memories carried by entire postwar generations, with subtle implications of irony in certain “comics” inserted in the paintings that “lighten” the conceptual message. The use of photographic fragments is recurrent in Guetta’s works, following the tradition of futurist collage, whose dynamism is also emphasized here by bold and sometimes shrill colors and through the coils of the memorialized ‘crowns’ made of beans (almost like the robes worn by the clergy) sinuously branching off like little streams of life and peace. It is this glowing dynamism that leads us “to grab a coffee” with the Futurists, the subject of her second set of works exhibited here, just like in the hisotrical Florentine café from which the “Giubbe Rosse” were born a little over a hundred years ago, debating progress, ethics and art. In these works of mixed media on canvas flare multi-colored flashes of progress, fireworks that ignite collages made up of famous photos of the Futurism pioneers (photos already symbolized in many paintings by Mario Schifano), old literary magazines and historical newspapers such as “Lacerba” and “Le Figaro”, the avant-garde symbols of the time such as the bicycle, the puffing train, the car or plane (it gives us back some of them through the neo-Dadaist ready-made three-dimensional models applied to the table), and advertising posters, all of which, by now, exist in the collective subconscious. All this, however, as a tribute to a movement for the renewal of the arts and society, a movement that has been instrumental in marking the twentirth century’s break with the past, but nowadays without any unconditional trust or blind optimism in some kind of a triumphant progress. Actually, perhaps Guetta’s works want to keep us from falling in the same traps of the past century. Lastly, the third group, with the tributes to Michelangelo. Once again we see the strong color palette without the nuance of absolute geometry, which refers to the twentieth century avant-gardes (in particular, the classical geometric abstraction of Mondrian and the Post-Painterly Abstraction of Dorazio). The bold colors are attached to a collage of Michelangelo’s works with fragments of photographs, in which the actual strings that hold together the paintings ‘bind’ them in an intense relationship of deep spiritual tension, strong and proud like the Renaissance Master’s temperament and, at the same time, defining relationships and balance, vanishing lines and planes of perspective that serve as the basis of the renaissance “style.” Once again, between flashes of estatic colors and pointy triangles of perspecticval torment, between strings that ‘lift’ the immortal icons, and fragments of jute sacks and rough ‘plaster’ that welcome the delicate frescoes of the soul with its angst and enlightened insights into infinity, we are lead back through Michelangelo’s candid rawness, the concreteness of everyday existence and the aforementioned sacks of coffee, while, between conceptual reflection and makeing light of subjects in a subtly ironic and surreal way, we will sip the coffee of life alonside the immortal and timeless art of the creator of the Sistine Chapel. A vision – that of Francesca Guetta – abstractly idyllic and cultural and, at the same time, realistic and disenchanted, but never existentially pessimistic, in which poetry, art and veiled irony all have the upper hand, playing the victorious role of a secular “evangelist” parable that is entirely modern.
GIAMPAOLO TROTTA
Giampaolo Trotta’s criticism edited for the solo exhibit “Un chicco, un profumo per il mondo… aspettando l’Expo” at the Istituto Agronomico for l’Oltremare di Firenze (the Overseas Agricultural Institute of Florence) – The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Department of Development Cooperation- 2015 Francesca Guetta is a complex artist, and, as such, it would be reductive to define her simply as a “painter.” Above all else, her works on canvas board mounted on wooden panels, demonstrate a comprehensive layering and juxtaposition of materials – some three-dimensional – to such an extent that we may speak of true works of “pittosculture.” In her paintings there is an obvious reference- due to the color palette and gestural quality of the brushstrokes- to a highly recognizable Italian Pop Art (for example, in her flowers that unconsciously mirror the style of Mario Schifano and his Gigli d’acqua) and to that which has been defined as the European response to American popular art, namely the Nouveau Réalisme, born under the aegis of Pierre Restany and, in particular, the interpretations of Arman with his “accumulations.” There are, however, substantial differences that give Guetta’s art a quality of absolute originality. As we know, the movement, originating in France in the Sixties, took up the theme of the Dadaist ready-made: an pre-made object of everyday utility, isolated from its utilitarian function, and elevated by the artist to become a work of art only through its new contextualization. In Arman’s case- who defined himself as “a painter who makes sculpture”- the inserting of broken objects was used to express the absurd mechanisms of consumerism. The object applied to the painted backdrop, however, could be any thing- smashed violins, tubes of paint, brushes, shoes, dolls, kettles- but the underlying concept hardly changed. Francesca Guetta, on the other hand, utilizes only a few particular objects closely related to the theme that she wishes to develop; she never relies on truly undifferentiated “accumulations.” Her work- highly conceptual and always connected, in this series of creations, with the underlying theme of universal social worth- is a real journey of cultural self-awareness carried out by the artist and possesses a common thread through which the author seeks to inspire us to reflect on a deeper reality. The theme of the five mixed media pieces- presented here in the first “group”- is that of coffee with its varied economic and social meanings. Through fragments of bale (in which roasted coffee beans are conserved) coffee beans themselves, coffee grinders and old mocha machines, artfully arranged on the green or earthy red “carpet”, Francesca Guetta makes us reflect on the possibility of fair trade marketing. This interpretation is supported by the written comments that, from an outward perspective, convey the pop art comic tradition. At the same time, the interpretation is emphasized through the symbolism of the production chain that moves the product from the countries of origin to our own table, materialized in a type of completely secular “rosary” made of roasted coffee beans (see A proposito del Caffè and Macinando… macinando). She offers an underlying plea to escape the deranged mechanisms of globalizing consumerism, to regain our individuality, in a context of simple things that can give us peace of mind: a possible “Paradise” on Earth (sometimes “captured” in surreal compositions) achieved “simply” by sipping a good cup of coffee, perhaps Neapolitan or from the old Artusi recipes, with subtle implications of irony in certain “comics” that “lighten” the conceptual message (see Paradiso… forse, Per una tazzina di caffè or A cuccumella). It is in this last piece, below a cut in the jute of Fontanian ascendency, emerges an image of a coffee plant sculpted into the balustrade belonging to the scale of the Overseas Agronomic Institute, alluding once again to the international cooperation for the development of all Nations. The use of photographic fragments is recurrent in Guetta’s works, following the tradition of futurist collage, whose dynamism is also emphasized here by bold and sometimes shrill colors and through the coils of the memorialized ‘crowns’ made of beans (almost like the robes worn by the clergy) sinuously branching off like little streams of life and peace, like umbilical chords that unite us fraternally. The remaining three works on display, however, engage with the more canonical styles of acrylic painting. A painting, as described previously, for masses of color from which derive- as foreseen- the figurative form of flowers, in a volcanic explosion of fiery resplendent gestural art. Speranza is a piece that we can almost interpret as a sort of trait d’union between painting and collage among this last series of Naturalia and the “pittosculture” of the previously mentioned group. A colorful kaleidoscope of images to give us hope that pure nature can once again triumph over the degradation of our contemporary cities, that from wastefulness and pollution a flower can be reborn, with poetic accents of the “flower children”, those “flower children” that succumbed to the logic of consumerism, that hippy utopia universalized by the winking suggestion to the idealness of the city of Humanism, to which the photograph of the San Gallo-styled Tavola di Urbino refers. A reflection on Nature that, nowadays, is all too often “restrained” by man, which seems symbolized by the work itself, ‘plastered’ on the canvas, a nature that is obstructed and suffocated by urban overbuilding. A vision – that of Francesca Guetta – realistic and disenchanted, but not existentially pessimistic, in which poetry, art and veiled irony all have the upper hand, playing the protagonists in a secular “evangelist” parable that is entirely modern.
GIAMPAOLO TROTTA
“Opera: Ma cosa hai messo nel caffè It’s a sound opera ! It’s funny to combine two Arts, a sounding and visual one, and in this performance it is possible to see, to hear, and … to enjoy! The idea of the composition was inspired by a song written and sung by Riccardo del Turco. In the opera we can notice that from the sounding gunnysack thrown diagonally to the right side (according to who enjoys the opera) and that is representing music (we can see a green musical note placed as an identifying brand), is bursting out: Coffee! Love! Poison?! The grinder, a historical symbol of the exciting black beverage is the visual coffee representative: the shape and its being is rendered by coffee beans, which are spread in the opera over a violet background … poison?! Either the song with its recurring melody or the yellow comic strip in the opera itself are both helping us when it tells us: “… but what did you put in the coffee that I I’ve drank over to your place? Now, there is something different in me. .. “. Poison, may be, is the doubt that is grasping even the main character of the song, but, a sweet poison … love! Represented by red little hearts which are dumped over there too, in the movement of the song, which are not ground by the grinder that grinds coffee, but not hearts! Coffee beans are also at the top of the opera, but now they are set up so to form either an anchor or an arrow falling down, showing the centre of the opera. The anchor indicates that after having drunk this potion (coffee), one is anchored to love (witnessed, reiterated by the red hearts); if instead, an arrow was represented, this would indicate that the dart of love has already been drunk. Even white flowers protruding from the gunnysack, are representing the surrendering to the fact which means that once the coffee is drunk, it has accomplished its prodigious duty. We just have to open all our senses and immerse ourselves in this …… olfactive picture! ” Opera: Caffè nero bollente This multiple material composition is an artistic opera set to music, because, inspired by the homonymous song sung by Fiorella Mannoia. The background which is from an intense yellow color recalls the Sun, which takes shape, through coffee beans, on the left side in relation to those who watch the opera. In the center of the opera, we can notice a jacket, made out of the gunnysack, the best container of freshly harvested coffee, which opens, protruding a coffee pot shaped like a bow tie, and three buttons also composed by coffee beans. The jacket is also decorated on both sides (right and left) by green flowers in style. A white flower, but not stylized, we find it too at the top of the composition. In the center of the creation, on the left side in relation to who is observing, we can see a purple comic strip that says “… and I’m killing time drinking hot black coffee in this nest warmed by a patient sun.” Coffee is boiling and black because heated by the primary source of heat: the Sun which is placed in the upper left side in the opera compared to the observer, so that the protagonists are the hot black coffee and the Sun, since it is the primary source of heat able to make black coffee hot! ” Criticism written by Claudia Di Cera on the occasion of National Art Exhibition “Synaesthesia – The art of notes and colors of music” held at the Accademia Musicale Mediterranea, Taranto,
CLAUDIA DI CERA
“Criticism from Alessandra Macchitella to Terezin inserted in the catalogue “ Premio Taras per l’Arte “ , 2017: “A pyjama can be tortured. This is demonstrated by the lines striped through pain. Like a sad curtain, they come down on one side and on the other, only black can tell what it was. In the middle, the white, the light, yellow and red, fluttering butterflies, symbols of a freedom that was lost with humanity. To deny it: a barbed wire. ”
ALESSANDRA MACCHITELLA
Criticism from Alessandra Macchitella to B7456 inserted in the catalogue “ Premio Taras per l’Arte “, 2017:” A star that was shield becomes jail. The black and decisive background, as the history of man can become, a blood-red line slices apart a wire barbed symbol. On the left, as two overlaped triangles, writings and documents, normality crushed by faces who are asking “is that a man? “. On the right, photos, filed and ready at the entrance to the end of the world. “.
ALESSANDRA MACCHITELLA
Criticism from Giorgio Falossi inserted in the volume “ Da Lucio Fontana al Giubileo di Papa Francesco 2016″ Ed. Il Quadrato: ” Francesca Guetta’s painting is marked by a research of historical representation and social ransom. The picture has the symbols of a lived and known reality that should be shaken because it tends towards the “not remembered” for laziness, greed or convenience. And here is the art that is not only a sign and color, but is idea, thought, and solicitation. The artist can hear and sneak away at the first opportunity; Francesca Guetta at the forefront gives power to voice, adds the writing that doesn’t lead to misunderstanding through dubious interpretations. Some symbol complete the work: barbed wire, coffee beans, flags, yellow star. Not only artworks but framework patterns and sign warps on human values, today like yesterday, so often flagrantly betrayed and trampled. A harsh language that states through compositional achievements of symbols that involve not only the power but also the humanity that we all represent. Francesca Guetta once again brings us back not so much to the painting but to an artistic universe, to the global message, not to illustrations weight down in various ways by bondage, but the interweaving of patterns, objects, flavors and smells, which combined together, are representing the events of a bent humanity, humiliated by the pain of living. Agile but rigorous shots always put on foreground, the artist uses the surface to stretch out in bright light objects, colored traces, reasonings and thoughts “.
GIORGIO FALOSSI
Paolo Levi’s critical review reported on Primo Trofeo Internazionale Arte Impero, Parigi – Vienna – Roma catalogue, Ea Publisher: ” In Francesca Guetta’s works, the technique of collage is presented with extreme elegance and harmony: color, different kinds of objects, fabrics , texts are layed out on the base transmitting a ludic message, that at the same time causes the observer to reflect on the contemporary world. A vibrant material warp stretches out in fragmented choreographies on the base, where written texts, everyday objects, newspaper cutouts are juxtaposed to the uniform and vivid backgrounds, generating a very personal language processed by the artist that enhances the expressive potentialities of the different used components. Along her pathway of research and experimentation, Francesca Guetta reveals details that come from the subconscious. These works look like psychic maps where material vibrations are lining out the mysterious trail of the creative impulse, leaving to the viewer the task of rebuilding the connections inherent to the narrative of her collages “.
PAOLO LEVI
Criticism from Arianna Fantuzzi and Anthea Notarangelo with the supervision of Gianni Dunil inserted in the catalogue Esposizione Triennale di Arti Visive a Roma 2017 – Aeterna, Start Edizioni : “ The florentine artist, Francesca Guetta began her career in the 2000s, studying painting at the C.U.E. A. of Florence. Later she perfected her technique in contact with several teachers, among which Andrea Sole Costa, Aida Teran and Giuseppe Ciccia. Her paintings combine to the strongly materical aspect an ordered nature as opposed to the chaos of the elements through a sober and calibrated arrangement. The serious study of composition leads Guetta to make paintings in which dominates the equilibrium of forms, followed by the choice of colors, always pretty lightened. Her works range from figurative to abstract, witnessing the expressive vivacity of the artist. The collages and the assemblages, in particular, combine elements taken from reality and able to return a possible image of the world, reelaborated through the fusion of materials. In “Puzzle”, Francesca Guetta enacts the succession of different shapes, tied together with a gray mortar that captures the rounded edges. On the uneven background stand out the different shades of pastel colors (grey, white, yellow, pink) that boost with their presence the positive perception of the artwork. Chromatic mosaic elements seem to find the own direction in the center of the work, where smaller and disorderly elements are collected, ready to be embedded to others.
ARIANNA FANTUZZI and ANTHEA NOTARANGELO with the supervision of GIANNI DUNIL
Critique written by Prof. Rosario Pinto and inserted in the art history text “Fra tradizione e innovazione. Movimenti ed idee dell’arte contemporanea dall’Impressionismo al Duemila “, volume IV, ed. Napoli Nostra, 2018: “In drawing an introductory profile of Francesca Guetta’s personality, Giampaolo Trotta points out that” it would be reductive to simply define as a painter “this artist, since above all her works on canvas panel mounted on a board, in fact, present an articulated stratification and juxtaposition of materials… to the point that we can speak of real painted relief scultures”. The proof of a creative practice that is developed by our artist as an opportunity that offers itself to deploy a multiple and complex experience on an existential level constitutes the basic element for an anchorage to historical reasons which, as it is possible to observe, critics see in the sign of a ‘popartist’ impermanence. All this is very important and deserves an in-depth investigation which is all the more appropriate if above all we weigh up some evaluations that the whole of our artist’s production activity suggests and manifests. For example, our artist’s willingness emerges to practice a painting with a generous informal breath, carried out, moreover, with a production option that does not hesitate to turn to the privilege of nuclear-branded resolutions as we can observe in acrylic works such as Bridled Nature or Among the Flowers. Paintings like the ones that we have just mentioned are particularly important to have a very significant measure of the horizon expansion that the work of our artist manifests, having the ability to place herself in a content sphere with a profiling of absolute interest and certainly in some way more advanced with respect to those Italian-style ‘popart’ orientations which, after all, her works could also be considered to be – and by virtue of a sort of heralded setting aside of the content consistencies as a reward for a lightening of the organic and inspissated meaningfulness of thought – they could also be understood we repeat, as anticipatory manifestations of that climate of abandonment of the commitment of art that would then tragically hit the artistic happenings with the ‘postmodern’ season. And so, having to take into account the fact that Guetta’s creative activity, also for purely chronological reasons, develops throughout the temporal continuation of the first Italian ‘pop-art’ season, it may be useful to underline how the deviation of our artist’s production from the Schifano or Dei Festa Roman climate , for example, (net, as far as the latter is concerned, of some specific sensitivities still typical of the climate of ‘Denunciation Realism’) constitutes a basic reason for the consideration of her creative research as an activity of absolute interest for the originality and proactive autonomy it discloses. And it might not be incongruous to also valorize in the activity of this artist a sort of unspoken abstractive scan, which is proposed as a propositional gradient of a silent normative disposition capable of acting from the recesses of creative inspiration, coming to provide a psychological standardization that acts in substitute for a wisely marginalized prediction of conscience “.
ROSARIO PINTO
“The keyword in Francesca Guetta’s work is multiplicity, either in terms of the used techniques, combining to the most traditional painting the polymaterial collage and the assembling of daily recovered materials, or as regards the evoked imaginary, ranging from the naturalistic subject transfigured in abstract key (Fiori) or reinterpreted in an environmentalist optic (La natura imbrigliata) to the characters of popular culture (Homage to George Michael) or of the artistic world (Omaggio a Michelangelo) told with an iconic-chromatic language. Even though being works perfectly autonomous in their meaning, their common point is the creative process evolution since ever opened to technical experimentation and to linguistic hybridization, either operating a cross between genres, or trespassing from one genre to another by means of technique. Not less important is the role of color, called to “aggregate” the different expressive levels and of meaning either within individual works (NY2017) or in a more choral manner among the various cycles of its production.” Critic feature written by Daniela Pronesti on the occasion of the personal exhibition “Dialoghi in divenire” held at Simultanea Spazi d’Arte, Florence.
DANIELA PRONESTI’
Critique written by Giorgio Falossi and included in the Volume “Leonardo 500 anni di Arte”, Il Quadrato Editions by Giorgio Falossi and Lorenzo Cipriani, 2019: “Gesture, sign and colour are all elements that concur in Francesca Guetta’s painting to the need to communicate in maximum freedom her intense participation in the modulations of Nature, in the progress of human civilization, in the hopes of a future. There is a rhythm in these works. The sign engraves the spaces, the light is obtained from white in a composition that is also harmony, order and invention, while dealing with a theme of world disorder. A search for a quick and effective language with a painting that tends towards simplification and essentiality because time is over. Francesca Guetta paints drifting fragments, broken bonds and devastated landscapes. Her painting evokes, not inveighs. Bridled colours and dirty whites in an intonation in which the fragments are measured in a chase, in an alternation of spaces and that little use of blue is destined not for the swallows in the sky but for the migrants in the sea. Details presented with careful and real foresight, accompanied by random writings of understandable words that sink like wounds, like deep cuts, into the bark of trees, into the canvas of the world.”
GIORGIO FALOSSI
“The keyword in Francesca Guetta’s work is multiplicity, either in terms of the used techniques, combining to the most traditional painting the polymaterial collage and the assembling of daily recovered materials, or as regards the evoked imaginary, ranging from the naturalistic subject transfigured in abstract key (Fiori) or reinterpreted in an environmentalist optic (La natura imbrigliata) to the characters of popular culture (Homage to George Michael) or of the artistic world (Omaggio a Michelangelo) told with an iconic-chromatic language. Even though being works perfectly autonomous in their meaning, their common point is the creative process evolution since ever opened to technical experimentation and to linguistic hybridization, either operating a cross between genres, or trespassing from one genre to another by means of technique. Not less important is the role of color, called to “aggregate” the different expressive levels and of meaning either within individual works (NY2017) or in a more choral manner among the various cycles of its production.” Critic feature written by Daniela Pronesti on the occasion of the personal exhibition “Dialoghi in divenire” held at Simultanea Spazi d’Arte, Florence.
Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea De Agostini 2019
Critique included in the Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea De Agostini 2020 with the scientific coordination of Daniele Radini Tedeschi and Stefania Pieralice: “A Florentine artist who has always had a particular attraction to the world of art. She begins studying painting in 2004 at C.U.E.A. in Florence and subsequently deepens her artistic training, attending courses and workshops of Florentine painters. Francesca Guetta’s style is cultured and transversal, ranging from futurist collage to Nouveau Realisme declined in the accumulating version of Arman. She develops a non-absolute abstraction, which shatters the idea of a unitary vision representative of reality and from which a conceptualism emerges that holds the ranks of a new meaningful communication. She takes up the sacredness of Duchamp’s readymades, placing them in a functional context, renewed in their meaning. For example, when spools of cotton appear on a panel, the visual choice is not casual or an end to the mere celebration of objects, but rather is configured as a reminder of the importance of a city as a centre of the textile industry. In her works, the destruction of the figure does not always become an iconic zeroing, since the latter remains jagged and uneven on the two- dimensional surface. Through fragments of reality, which are related according to a new order, resulting directly from an inner feeling, she wants to focus attention on relevant ethical and social values. The result is expressed through creations with an overwhelming evocative force that range from the naturalistic to the popular theme, to reach the artistic world. Colour acts as a deus ex machina for the intersection of the different expressive levels, which converge in a single communication channel “.
Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea De Agostini 2020
Critique written by Daniela Pronestì on the series “La natura imbrigliata ” published in the magazine La Toscana Nuova – year 3 – number 8 – September 2020, critical eye section, on the occasion of the collective exhibition Racconti di fine estate at the Terme Beach Resort in Punta Marina (Ra): “Humiliated, violated, reduced to mere dumping of waste; this is the nature to which Francesca Guetta’s works refer to to narrate the drama and at the same time imagine a different future. An acknowledgment capable of breaking the bonds within which the natural environment is “bridled”, like a slave reduced to chains by man’s arrogance. Complex creations, those of Guetta, layered in meanings as well as in the variety of materials recovered and assembled by the artist to symbolize, precisely through an arduous formal elaboration, how difficult it is to raise collective awareness on the environmental issue. The first to be “bridled” in the plot that shrounds the work – fragments of bark, aluminum and colour placed in such a way as to recall clods of earth and stretches of water – are us, each of us, every time we engage in harmful behaviour for the environment, regardless of the damage done above all to ourselves. “Bridled” is nature, a prisoner, as it is, of the effects of savage exploitation, the victim of constant abuse that triggers a process with no return. A more topical theme than ever before which the artist has been dealing with for some time, lending the experience gained over the years in painting to the formulation of a hybrid language, a combination of form and colour, recovery and combination of natural and artificial materials gathered together to signify the action of man opposed to the free creativity of nature. Works to be explored with the gaze, following the red thread that traps and at the same time preserves these fragments of nature from any external aggression. The function of this expressive element, in fact, is ambivalent: on the one hand, it evokes what denies and suffocates life, the deadly embrace of a destructive force; on the other hand it protects the body of the work and enlivens it as if it were lymph. We find it in all the works of the series “La natura imbrigliata “, as if to sanction the conceptual and stylistic continuity of a project in which most of the experiments conducted so far by the artist are condensed, reaching maturity, integrating different mediums and expressive codes. In this case, the use of the hybrid form of painted relief sculpture allows her to obtain effects of verisimilitude aimed at highlighting the mystification of the concept of nature in a society that increasingly confuses truth and artifice, authenticity and fiction. For Francesca Guetta there are no other paths to embark on, therefore, other than the one that leads to rediscovering a deep contact with oneself and with the surrounding environment to restore the indissoluble and ancient bond between man and nature “.
DANIELA PRONESTI’
Review by Professor Diego Fusaro on the series “La natura imbrigliata” (“Harnessed Nature”) drafted for the General Catalog of artists selected by Precis Arte 2020, volume edited by Diego Fusaro and Lucia La Sorsa, Publisher: Print Me S.r.l.: “The artist sets the tone of her convincing work by playing on the link between geometric figures and symbolism. The visual effect is commendable, and her use of chromatic tones is impressive, especially the use of red in the geometric shapes. Viewing the work as a whole, which appears mature and impressive in all its productions, almost seems to recall the Kantian distinction between a natura materialiter spectate and a natura formaliter spectate. On the one hand, the observer sees nature as it is materially, with its shapes and its gaudy colors, with its material entities and with its concrete determinations. While on the other hand, thanks to the geometric lines, the viewer can see the nature that Kant calls formaliter spectata, seen on a formal and geometric level.”
DIEGO FUSARO
Critique written by Sandro Serradifalco printed in the bimonthly art periodical Art Now, number VI, year III, November/December 2020 and also used in the context of the television program “Italian Excellence – Stories of Artists, the difference that makes the difference” aired on March 23rd, 2021 on Odeon TV (channel 177): “The artist’s informal compositions describe magmatic stratifications of color where fabrics and other materials are grafted together with a strong symbolic appeal. The artist’s dense stroke creates overlapping striations, with large backgrounds that reveal an instinctive but predesigned gestural expressiveness. Subtle shades declined in brown animate the soft lines drawn by Guetta, which effectively reproduce the infinite range of colors that belong to the earth, where the use of multi-materialism gives sculptural depth to some details. Minimal in its lines and colors, these warm-toned works reveal the cervices from which the internal energy of our planet flows forth, at some moments silent and bearer of fertility, at others, violent and unstoppable in its destructive impetuosity. The symbolism is clearly evident in visual metaphors that remind us of the inherent need in each person to communicate and transmit our feelings through the paths of poetry. They are also historical testimonies of the recent past that have led to a broader and more complex form of reflection. The artist therefore reflects on the essential role of art even in the age of technology, demonstrating how it is still the most effective tool for transmitting our emotions.”
SANDRO SERRADIFALCO
Dr. Mara Ferloni’s critical mention included in the Volume Art Best Seller! 2021 published by the International Gallery Association “Il Collezionista” (“The Collectionist”) on the occasion of the Art Best Seller! exhibition in 2021 at the Bellini Museum in Florence: “The works made of multi-material and aluminum show a particular symbolic expressive synthesis and a modern interpretation that aims to highlight the environmental problems in which man “harnesses nature.”
MARA FERLONI
Critique written by Silvia Ranzi and published in Pègaso magazine, a quarterly magazine of culture, art and ways of life founded in 1929 by Ugo Ojetti, N. 211 September-December 2021, and entitled “Francesca Guetta, Iconografie Simboliche” (“Francesca Guetta, Symbolic Iconography”): “Francesca Guetta, originally from Florence where she lives and works, has to her credit an artistic career of over twenty years of brilliant productive focus, studded with participation in important art competitions and glowing reviews, both in Italy and abroad. She has been the recipient of awards, has presented work in public and private collections and in macro-thematic solo shows, and has been reviewed in more than one hundred catalogs, gaining the appreciation of critics and the public in prestigious galleries and historical locations throughout the country, through the use of cultural elements proposed in her eclectic vision. Her original stylistic poetics reveal her adherence to a kaleidoscopic and multifaceted aesthetic for revisited ancestry, animated by versatile inner urgencies. Her artistic practice, which also includes installations, is both conceptual and pragmatic at the same time, marrying the fascination for twenties century avant-garde in a range of styles from expressionist action painting to Futurist dynamism with vivid colors and intermittent vanishing points and backgrounds embellished with collage cutouts, with a reliance on the appeal of ready-made Pop deriving from the New Dada movement, favoring the rendering of pictorial sculptural two-dimensionality. Her work at the personal exhibition entitled “Coffee with Michelangelo and the Futurists” (November 2015) at the ancient Society of Artists “Casa di Dante” (Dante’s Home”), her ability is demonstrated through charismatic flair in a dialogue across various eras based on the cultural climate present in each of its brilliant works: Michelangelo’s Renaissance Humanism in its plastic power dialectically meets the Futurist representations of prevailing industrialization, dominated by speed, in search of the new, in the emblematic alternation comparing past and present. The informal multi-material melting pot implemented in her ideations, between sentiment and reason, unite the symbolism and gesturalism of the pigments in magmatic stratifications with variegated colors and stylized textures. They are supported by figural insertions from contemporary references, generating original combine-painting which is proactive toward the sociological appropriations of the environment and ethical-social themes aimed to sensitize the conscience of the postmodern person. Recently, her aesthetic factuality has been devoted toward interpreting the primitive origins of the four elements of the sensitive universe, in homage to primordial matter, as can be observed in the work presented in a personal mini-exhibition at the festival of the arts “Terra Madre” (“Motherland”) (2019) to promote the protection of nature against technological abuses and the depletion of planetary resources. In addition, her work voices the denunciation of feminicide, speaks about modern migratory phenomena, and lastly, in participating in the important exhibition “Il Segno della Memoria” (“The Mark of Memory”) (2016) at the Limonaia of Villa Vogel in Florence, she defends the inclusive values of peace in the face of war crimes, persecutions and genocides and the human tragedy of the Holocaust. As an authentic ambassador of the identifying value of art in the free expression of its adopted codes, her creations capture the attention of the viewer with works containing iconography rich in formal symbolism of the fecundity of inner aspirations, deserving of critic Sandro Serradifalco’s fitting definition of “visual metaphors.”
SILVIA RANZI
Review by Dr. Iff published in IconArt Magazine, in the Art Notes section: “Conceptual and material, social and supportive, referencing pop trends but with forays into Futurism… Francesca Guetta’s art is a real and original explanation of an intimate consideration on the contemporary world and its socio-economic dynamics that make twentieth century artistic currents a reference for elaborating her singular and personal language. The artist speaks of her vision of reality through an interconnection between different materials and the themes addressed, juxtaposing the elements in order to find a playful and similar correspondence of signs and meanings that ultimately lead to reflection. This can be observed in “Macinando… macinando,” (“Grinding… grinding”) a work that belongs to the coffee series, in which the composition is built with a clear dialogic and exhortative intent. On the canvas, colors, materials and elements are arranged like graphic signs on the paper: words made of matter and color layered on the surface communicate a social message of cooperation and eco-sustainable development. Retracing jargon that evokes a futurist matrix with influences of pop and the evocative power of comics, the work appear Iffs as a sort of three-dimensional collage, where the constituent elements range from the present physicality of fragrant coffee beans to a real grinder, to the clippings of images of paper on a background in which cardboard and jute stand out in a chromatic encounter. Everything contributes to bringing to light the symbolic representation of fair-trade supply chain, production and marketing of coffee. Thus, the image of the basket of freshly picked coffee seeds and the hand holding roasted beans evoke the small businesses of coffee producing countries, while the grinder represents the expression of European markets.”
Dr Iff
Critical text by Ivan Caccavale about Francesca Guetta: “The prodromes of Francesca Guetta’s artistic activity fall within the channel of a figurative realism in the traditional sense, while moving away from it she conceives and embodies various stylistic features, from time to time, associating them with an expanse of conceptual experience. Between ready-made and ex novo creations, her painting becomes painting-sculpture, revealing a strong and indissoluble bond with technical manual skill, creative and refined, that is capable of weaving valid relationships with the text. In these orchestrations, in which the chromatic treatment and the way paint is laid down communicate with the material (or rather, they become it), there is no lack of recycled materials which refer to the elements of earth and water. The use of fluid art, characterized by a nuanced and “mediated” palette (despite the automatisms implicit in this technique), serves to express the emerging states of mind. She greatly employs aluminum, plaster, zinc, the latter of which is used for unexpected Luminist lighting capable of giving movement to the canvas, as in “Tra l’edera” (“Between the Ivy”). The critical eye opens to the realty in which she is inserted and through which she moves, challenging issues which are therefore of undoubted symbolic and social value. Thus, objects of daily use become instrumental in explaining an idea or in bringing a problem or urgency to the attention of the observer. In some cases, the works oscillate between messages of danger and hope: danger in reference to stubborn exploitation perpetrated to the detriment of the terrestrial ecosystem, resulting in terrible consequences, already known to all, demonstrated by increasing frequency and destructivity; and hope because, despite everything, the creation of the Earth is founded upon a perfect balance, offering its intrinsic message of beauty and the possibility of liberation and “redemption” to those who know how to grasp it. The work shows an explosive and florid nature through the chromo-formal organization that Guetta uses, becoming the second term of a manichean duality, dense with poetry and lyrically vibrant, an answer to the anthropized and cemented landscape to which people are accustomed nowadays. There is no shortage of tributes to the past, to eminent figures of the Florentine Renaissance, who walked the same streets as Guetta (in fact, she is a native of the Tuscan capital), and to movements of the twentieth century. Thus, cut-out figures are inserted into real scenographies, following the phases of a process of objectification of the image, from idea to reality. These works lay the foundation for the stimulating involvement of the audience, for which they aim to revive and/or awaken its interest in reference to certain topics. Her ambition toward the multiform is also quite evident, with a particular tendency toward the fragment: fragments which, in their individual and autonomous symbolic significance, contribute to the general ideological construction, that each element- not repeated and unable to be reiterated- is both sufficient in and of itself and also functionally contributes to the overall design. Therefore, it is disiecta membra (scattered fragments in Latin) and not mosaic tiling, whose execution depends on the uniform repetition, in a paratactic sense, of the overall work. The artist can be compared with the poetics of Tano Festa, fundamentally for two aspects: confetti and the ready-made. In fact, Guetta’s insertions on the support material could resemble confetti, but while in the work of the Tuscan artist everything is part of a well-balanced and calibrated game, in Festa’s case it is undeniably a voluntary recourse to spontaneity, aligned with the jubilant atmosphere of the Sixties, free from shackles and devoted to expressive freedom. Furthermore, while the Roman master makes use of objects without and/or deprived of functionality (shutters, mirrors, armoires, etc.), whose nonsense acquires a symbology and an analytical and metaphysical declination, for the contemporary artist presented here they are always loaded with meaning, coherent of what they intend to communicate.”
IVAN CACCAVALE
Review by Dr. Maria Araceli Meluzzi written for the General Catalog of artists selected by Precis Arte 2021, volume edited by Maria Araceli Meluzzi and Lucia La Sorsa, published by Print Me S.r.l.: “Poetess of matter in all its facets, Guetta is an artist of the most authentic multi-material style. Although at first glance the subtext appears hermeneutic, suddenly the lines that compose it gradually acquire meaning. The symbology is clear, and the climax evident and full of meaning. The colors are the protagonists of a disturbing feeling made up of oxymoronic signs. The subtle aim is undoubtedly that of imprinting concepts into the mind of the viewer that are harnessed but full of light in their meaning, embellished by the pioneer vein of the artist who still has a lot to say and to recycle.”
MARIA ARACELI MELUZZI
Review by Professor Diego Fusaro edited for the monograph Francesca Guetta “Talents” for the Art Series by Professor Diego Fusaro, organized by the Precis Arte of La Sorsa Lucia, 2022: An explosion of primary and complementary colors breaks the shackles, harnesses and laces of the glossy patina, the product of an ultra-capitalist society, allowing the passage from the outer surface to inside the eye of the storm. An intricate Dante-esque forest of material tangles and saturated colors in which one can identify the cornerstone, which becomes the absolute protagonist in the works of the Florentine artist Francesca Guetta, both in works in which she is present and in those in which she is absent in physical form. However, they are metaphorically translated into material applications and effigies of idols in a sort of incomplete and reversible chemical reaction; reagent and product in an osmotic gradient that moves the gaze from the concept to the object and vice versa, creating an innovative and sustainable subject, as it is conceptually “recycled” by lessons of the great masters of now totally outdated modern art. In the vortex of Heideggerian memory, the sensibility expressed in the material is deposited like stardust, cosmic debris and windswept souls, lustful of an entirely pop consumerism. The medium chosen by the artist becomes the focal point, the pivot hidden inside, the primitive archetype on which the foundations of modernity are built as if in a narrative dream in which Banksy graffitied together with Magritte after arriving in a post-class lesson by Duchamp, sitting comfortably on his urinals which hang on the wall, straddling the generation gap on the unstructured and anonymous back of the decapitated equines of the oppositional Cattelan of which he lends the hierarchical and chaotic form of his megalomaniac idea of installation which, translated into the eclectic and polyphonic language of the Florentine artist, translates into a complex perspective scheme guided by straight and geometric lines of force with a futurist flavor, all seasoned with that dynamism so dear to Boccioni and Carrà. The liaison, the meaning, the common thread that binds, harnesses and constrains volumetric and natural fragments on the flat canvas is precisely the synthesis of the whole conceptual world: the poetics of the artist Guetta, expressed in a New Dadaism more regal than the king, cut from magazines as if in a new version La Guernica, incarnate and wrapped, in the religious sense of the term, in the faces of sanctified celebrities. Explanatory captions are surrendered and the mantra-like aphorism of the “have a good day” on display in the best urban cafes is aimed at reminding us that, in that rare moment of pause, we should take the time to observe and appreciate the essence of everything, of what really matters, leaving behind us the frenetic tornado of everyday life, not a place where analysis and discernment are canceled but where the collective and personal conscience is turned upside down and lost until it returns to the original Kaos, producing giant Titans that impose themselves against the defenseless people, sung by the Adelchi choir, the conscience, collapsing in the sleep of reasoning, long-ago imagined in ancient times by Goya who had engraved in his “passing fancy” a warning to the coming peoples against the nightmare of contemporary obscurantism from which, without a critical look, it would be impossible to distance themselves and to disagree.
DIEGO FUSARO
Critical text by Ivan Caccavale on the occasion of Francesca Guetta’s solo exhibition entitled “La natura imbrigliata” (“Harnessed Nature”) at the White Cube Gallery in Veroli: Pino Pascali, with his intent to revitalize the individual object and with the frequent use of simple materials, aimed to configure the work of art as a real sensitive experience, with the approach of an artisan, of an author of actions: in light of this, he can rightly be considered a forerunner of Arte Povera. The florentine Francesca Guetta, consciously or not, as an artist with western DNA, italian in particular, demonstrates a certain tangency with this important historicized figure, certainly ideologically, though with that typical characterization that makes each of us an inimitable and unrepeatable unicum. Pascali used to say: “I try to do what I like. After all, doing is the only system that suits me “. A strong link to manual skills, therefore, clearly evident, for example, in the creation of the so-called False sculture, made from wood, canvas, steel wool, straw, raffia; at the same time, Guetta gets us used to compositions made with the use of recycled and reused material, in which a not inconsiderable social commitment is perceived. She confronts herself with the real contingent and questions herself, reading and decoding messages and communications from the reality she lives in, through the mass media; her works sometimes suggest, sometimes affirm. The cycle La Natura imbrigliata takes origins and shape in consideration of this and grabs attention for the coherence that binds every work of it. We use to decline the adjective “harnessed” according to a negative meaning: common thought, in fact, calls to mind something that prevents normal locomotion activities, an obstacle to action. In this case, natural processes and mechanisms are inhibited, continuously altered by increasingly invasive interventions by work of the human being. However, that omnipresent red string, the stylistic code of the serie, which links and joins together the various sections of every work of this genre, almost seems to reveal a protective intent, of safeguard. Red, therefore, a bright color, symbol of love, of passion (from the Latin passio, suffering), but at the same time associated with the idea of alarm, of emergency; it reveals a certain will, of the artist, of preservation of the world ecosystem, but also of an evident concern, or rather restlessness, linked to environmental troubles so urgent that humanity is called to resolve in tight and pressing times. Thus framed, these works follow one another paratactically in front of the observer, however demonstrating their own autonomy in the general economy, with a virtuous game of knots, now simple now complex, able to give life to floral and geometric shapes.
IVAN CACCAVALE
Critique edited by Dr. Stefania Pieralice draw up on occasion of the synopsis of the work To Ukraine hosted at the National Pavilion Grenada at 59. Biennial of Venice Art: “Celestial privacy, for the big dilemmas in the veins, the weaves Francesca Guetta, not just any artist but a woman from the passion touched, that feels on herself a vocation on mankind. And the Beauty that Our presents us does not like compromises or aesthetic flattery or tin idols again connoted by pure hypocrisy. She, through the art, creates peace posters, wonder and love. And To Ukraine unearth the recklessness of the current, the suffering. The sky is shattered, in the vault, from air strikes. Of the prosperous cornfields all that remains is debris, the bands of the national flag are dismembered, the fragmented colors are lost looking for a bit broken by the war. At the disorganized rotation of the fragments – almost synecdoche of houses reduced to rubble – it contrasts the tightening, overhanging and uniformly black of the barbed wire which imprisons in a grid, making vain the “bravery”, the “peace”, the “hope” and at the same time hides the perpetrated “horror”. It is the pain that resonates in the canvas to anticipate the message; it is the failure of illusions to deliver man into the arms of Nothingness, although in this case it’s not about art but of yearning prayer. And then the work stages the desolation of a battlefield, burial of coffins among the rubble, of expectations and breathings of dead without speech and alive who will never know what life is.”
STEFANIA PIERALICE
BARBARA ANGIOLINI
“Arte Povera, New Dada and immense creativity drive the Florentine Guetta to examine the history and culture of art. Over the past few months she has concentrated on Michelangelo’s intensity and the futuristic ardor. Both subjects fulfilled through an intensity of materials and colors, and the incisiveness of collage. And that’s where Guetta reaches intense compositions, an extra spark.” (“La Libertà” of Piacenza, the “Cultura e Spettacoli” column, 29 March 2012, for the exhibition in “La Spadarina” gallery.)
FABIO BIANCHI
“From Francesca Guetta we have the piece A proposito del Caffè. Her choice falls on various materials that recall recyclables, the jute bags in an old coffee pot and some coffee beans. But also references to the arts, to the work whose plasticity is enhanced by the color green that covers much of the piece. A search for nature, for the elements, and for their essence which is reflected in the written word, the expression of a pop art piece, yet significant in its content and its meanings.” (Il Caffè e l’Arte, IV International Competition “Il Caffè e l’Arte”, Milan, 29 September – 13 October 2012, “Galleria degli Artisti”)
LIDIA SILANOS
“This composition, dedicated to the genius of art, the great Michelangelo, could not have been anything other than effective and authentic, having been conceived and created by the Florentine artist who possesses in her genes and pores the energy of Buonattori. The colors move between the classic and the contemporary, between the clarity and precision of this reality and the nuances of the past, in a piece that is fundamentally informal. The hand that sculpts is a human action guided by the divine, where time and space become the moment, the eternal […] expressing itself as a look of wonder, shifting from the basic to the specific. Michelangelo himself, before completing the Giudizio Universale (The Last Judgment), the culmination of his life’s work, wrote ‘But what can I do, Lord, if you do not come to guide me?’” (exhibition “Colori in concerto – dalla Toscana e dalla Liguria un inno al colore,” 2012, certificate of artistic merit for the painting Omaggio a Michelangelo III)
POMPEA VERGARO
“The artist, skilled in painting techniques, enhances the art of representation to give value to her own emotions. Il Caffè is a work of art created with mixed media on canvas. Through a skilful working of assemblage and collage the artist, using very few elements, evokes an objective reality constructed with great sensitivity to color. One may find an echoing of pop art through the explicit reference to the phenomenon of communication: the use of cartoons, of the coffee maker, of coffee as an industrial product of mass consumption; as well as the futuristic collage in which the sorrounding reality enters the painting through visual narratives that bring the onlooker in a world in which it is still okay to dream. Guetta wants to emphasize the desire for fair trade, in which the primary objective is not to maximize profit, but the fight against exploitation and poverty. A profound message. Exquistitely modern.” (A proposito del caffè, catalog of “Festival delle Belle Arti e della Cultura del XXI secolo,” Museo Bellini, Florence, Publications of La Rosa dei Venti, 2013)
DANIELE RADINI TEDESCHI
“Each painting conveys a message through an innovative artistic language centered on colors and, at times, mixed media collage. In this regard, considerable importance fills the series of the Omaggi. The many panels dedicated to Michelangelo honor the “not yet seen,” taking advantage of a unique and highly recognizable style, in a collage of prints and coarse rope that invokes both the manual labor and the artistic touch. It is the artist herself who questions her work; a meta-language used by Art to talk about itself, inspired by the great master of eclecticism. In other collages, however, small ready-made models become suggestive symbols naïve of historical contexts. A relentless search to explore without reservation, leaving the mind free to surpass the horizon of what has ‘already been seen’, to arrive at new sensations and evocative intimate or shared emotions […]” (Omaggi a Michelangelo e Omaggi al Futurismo, Un’eccellenza italiana,a virtual exhibit uploaded on “3D Art Gallery” on Youtube from 2013)
LETIZIA LANZAROTTI
“Francesca Guetta offers an example of a paradisiacal transformation in the ‘pagan’ sense with her book Paradiso … forse, a critical work that remains conceptually wary in which the Empyrean is dealt a blow in his materiality: cotton balls in place of clouds, coffee (Lavazza) like in the T.V. commercials, classical music as the harmony of the spheres, cigarettes as a relaxing vice and therefore ‘heavenly’ […]” Paradiso … forse, “Esposizione Triennale di Arti Visive,” Rome 2014, Tiltestetica, catalog curated by D. Radini Tedeschi, Editorial by Giorgio Mondadori, 2014)
DANIELE RADINI TEDESCHI
“What distinguishes and characterizes the work of Francesca Guetta is ‘a willingness’ to field a research that is capable of developing an integration of aspects of material culture with the sensitivities of the properties of objects, constantly in relation to the unavoidable fact of the epiphenomenal reference. With these features that are intended not only as a horizon of creative practice strongly committed to the façade of the formal definition, Francesca Guetta’s paintings become a moment of intersection between structural organization and subjective sensitivity. It seems advisable to also draw attention to the chromatic fullness that presents itself as an internal brightness produced by flickering of colors, a chromatic fullness that appears to be supported by an effectively placed composition, which must be seen not merely in terms of aesthetic appeal, but above all else for the substance of its content.” (the series Omaggio a Michelangelo,” from the exhibition brochure, “Anacapri” gallery, Capri, 2014)
ROSARIO PINTO
“Francesca Guetta loves to surprise herself and her audience with her innate propensity for novelty and experimentation with techniques and materials. She puts herself to the test by confronting challenges that are always more intriguing and fascinating than the last. This time she draws inspiration from collage to play with visions and musings gleaned from the eternity of the imaginary and the absurd that color Alice’s experience in her wonderland. A proposito di Alice is a work in which branches protrude from the vibrantly colored background and seem to break free from the heart of the piece transformed by the sensitivity of the artist in a stack of books arranged as steps in a strange, surrealistic ladder. Alice’s hands hold open the last book from the ladder with pages from which musical notes from a score have escaped to become the melodies of guitar strings. A dreamy, imaginative, surreal composition in which Guetta brings us to the understanding and representation of ‘the Beyond’, a work in which the author uses yet again the technique of collage and the vivacity of acrylics. The intense composition is extremely effective in portraying the two opposite worlds of which the central female figure is the protagonist. Dull, dreary, dark, and suffocating like a cage is the world she seems to escape from, imagination and color being the coveted prizes of her flight to freedom, towards her ‘beyond.’ The search seems to be the leitmotif of the artist’s world, and this time her search leaves us to enjoy the simple freedom that takes on life in an interior sanctuary made of little things, of vivid colors, and of cherished childhood memories. Her dream is one of a deep blue, illuminated by yellow from a cardboard sun that shines on painted flowers while butterflies and little toy airplanes fly through the air. Francesca Guetta offers an appraiser of art a spontaneous, kaleidoscopic and versatile work created with great skill and a sensitive vitality.” (Oltre and A proposito di Alice, catalogo Ars Gratia Artis, L’Arte per l’Arte,” Precis Arte Edizione, 2014)
CARLA GRASSANO
“Francesca Guetta’s piece entitled Omaggio a Michelangelo III is based on a construct in which Michelangelo’s words are placed into an abstract context and joined with the three primary colors. It deals with a cultured message that insinuates a sense of devout belonging to an immeasurable tradition with which every Italian artist must inevitably and humbly confront. A freshly inventive contrast between dynamic bands of color and the unique characteristics of sculptural forms” (expertise for Omaggio a Michelangelo III)
PAOLO LEVI
“A proposito del caffè, by Francesca Guetta, is a mixed media piece about an issue to contemplate- the spread of consumer goods in our times. The assembly of the figurative elements, a burlap sack of coffee beans and the parts of a coffee maker on a monochromatic green background, gives a setting for a compositional narrative that evokes the unbridgeable economic and social distance between our world and the Third World.” (expertise for A proposito del caffè)
PAOLO LEVI
“Omaggio alle Giubbe Rosse by Francesca Guetta is a work of mixed media that takes us back to an important moment in Florentine culture in the early Twentieth Century. The name of the title derives from the café where the intellectuals associated with the magazine “Lacerba,” lead by Giovanni Papini, would congregate. The use of quotes is quite timely with the iconographic references of the era and on the cultural imagination of modernity. The author thus composes a sort of commemorative fresco with a captivating visual force.” (expertise for Omaggio alle Giubbe Rosse )
PAOLO LEVI
“This work entitled Omaggio al Futurismo by Francesca Guetta is representative of an Italian artistic season among the most important of the first half of the last century. In a construct of geometric abstraction played out on the primary colors, the authors of Futurism appear to be arranged in perfect formal chromatic harmony. In plain view it is a classic advertising elaboration by Fortunato Depero.” (expertise for Omaggio al Futurismo)
PAOLO LEVI
“Francesca Guetta’s Omaggio a Michelangelo XI is a mixed-media piece that echoes a theme expressed in a Michelangelo quotation. The context is formed on an abstract geometric installation in which the collage of images and written pages is the cultured pretext for reflection on the museum of Italian art history. Extremely appealing is the use of primary colors that accompany the fragments of drawings and paintings, breaking them down into a very effective visual phantasmagoria.” (expertise for Omaggio a Michelangelo XI)
PAOLO LEVI
Criticism written by Giampaolo Trotta inserted in the exhibition catalogue “Il segno della memoria” (The memory sign), 2nd Edition, Limonaia of Villa Vogel, Florence. Francesca Guetta is a complex artist, and it would be downgrading to simply define her a “painter”. Moreover her masterpieces are executed on canvas paperboard mounted on a board. In fact, they are showing an articulated layering and juxtaposition of materials, even three-dimensional, in such a way that we can talk about real “pictosculpture”. In terms of colors and gesture signs, inside her pictures, the reminiscence to Pop Art, either of Italian or American source, as well as what was defined the European answer to the American folk art, namely the Nouveau Réalisme born under the governance of Pierre Restany and in particular the one interpreted by Arman with its “accumulations “. There are, however, substantial differences, which are leading Guetta’s art to an absolute originality, as I already had a chance to mention on another occasion. As we know, the movement originated in France in the sixties, took again the ready-made Dadaist concept, namely that of an everyday already made object, isolated from its functional context and elevated by an artist to artwork only through new contextualization. In Arman, who happily called himself “un peintre qui fait de la sculpture” (a painter that only does sculpture), the insertion of destroyed objects meant to express the absurd engagement of consumerism, which makes anything, that is pragmatically no longer needed, losing its value. Guetta, instead, uses only some “ reused “ objects and sometimes recovered from forgotten corners of dusty attics, but always closely related to the theme she wants to deal with and never real “ accumulations “ of almost undifferentiated disused objects, broken and devoid of value and meaning, from recovered up to a dignity and symbolic and artistic significance. Her artwork – highly conceptual and always linked to social and universal themes – is a real cathartic path of cultural self-consciousness that the artist follows. It possesses a leading thread through which the author wants us to think about deep realities. A realistic and disenchanted vision – Francesca Guetta’s one – but not pessimistic under an existential point of view, always veiled by an auroral hope. This is not contradicted, even not on this occasion. The hereby presented installation – Never Again – already exhibited (with variations) in Rome, is illustrated by a “ picture “ embedded in a highly symbolic and evocative setting, made for fragments of “ things “ that illuminate the memory. As for her habit, the square canvas that is dominating the center of the stage, is entirely covered with a collage of vintage photos: in the central strip of the picture we can see the railway entrance of Auschwitz and a train wagon assigned to the transport of Jews; on the left and right sides, photos taken from the famous KZ Bildbericht aus fünf Konzentrationslagern (Pictures report of five concentration camps) a little notebook in German language printed by the Allied, with results of the first inspections conducted by Allied troops in the concentration camps of Buchenwald, Belsen, Gardelegen, Nordhausen and Ohrdruf. In that time, this was made to awaken the consciences of all those Germans who could not or didn’t want to see the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Nowadays, this means a warning sign of an alert memory so that this will Never happen Again. Finally, in the center, the infamous list of the Jewish population to be cancelled across Europe, compiled by Adolf Eichmann for the Wannsee Conference of 1942, where the “final solution of the Jewish question” was clearly planned. Down, on the left side, the picture of the original Diary of Anna Frank, still exhibited in the Museum-House of Anna Frank in Amsterdam, turned yellow over the time, is emerging from the sharp black and white previous pictures. In the murky swirl of memories that squeezes man like inside an unsustainable nightmare, inside the “ black “ suffocating pessimism, however, here at the top, always on the left side, the photo of the inscription in three language, at the entrance of the “Garden of the Righteous” in the Museum Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, is “exploding“ as a flashlight. This Garden opened in 1960 at the behest of Moshe Bejski, one that was saved by Oskar Schindler. With this, Francesca Guetta, as a sign of hope and light, wished to remind us that not everybody, in that time, pretended not to see and not to know. But there were also some of them that, at the risk of their own live, would help Jews, indeed the Righteous among the Nations. As for her habit, Guetta is enriching the artwork in a three dimensional way with almost neodadaist objects, but, as it has been pointed out previously, not random and out of context, meaning with significances far away from New Dada and Arman Réalisme. Recovering formally – albeit with variations – that icon reconstruction photo that became well-known and so much reproduced since year 2000 concerning the Holocaust Memorial Day, on the above mentioned collage (almost a laminated wall, a playlist of “ posters “ that are overlapping, from the distant echoes of what was the European take off and mostly known as the Rotella’s experiences), Guetta is laying on a typical lager prisoners dirty worn out and torn shirt (despite being a reproduction). Two elements on that shirt (a squeezed bas-relief, unlike other “ accumulations “ of hers, concerning canvas objects, which are really full-relief). The first one is the typical yellow fabric Jewish internees star, stitched on the shirt, in its variant with the red triangle of political prisoners, and with the “I” letter in reference to Italian nationality of the symbolic Jew. The second is a handwritten transcription, on a fragment of canvas then sewn on the tunic, from a poem by Primo Levi posted as a preface to his book “If this is a man” (see the text in Appendix). Four horizontal rows of authentic and gleaming barbed wire are “ nailing “ the tunic – a chromatic point without nuance of absolute geometry, which refers to 20th century Avant-garde and that lightens the canvas and focuses in blood-red pointed triangle of the above mentioned star, and imprisoning the canvas itself and wrapping up in the tormenting swirl of the past, with formal recalls – but only formal – to the ropes , themselves real too, that “are binding “ some paintings of Guetta in the series of Tributes to Michelangelo, ropes that, in this case, are tightening the paintings in deep tension and spiritual relationships, strong and proud as the temperament of the Renaissance Maestro and, at the same time, are defining relationships and balances, lines of flight and perspectives that are the basis of Renaissance Mannerism. As pointed out by the artist, resuming a typically Jewish tradition, “I decided to insert stones on the floor to reaffirm the concept of remembrance: we remember what happened, we make sure that the memory is present, that we do speak”. The “stones of remembrance” are also representing – physically and symbolically – a white spot of light as opposed to the leaden and absolute black of the seabed. A black cloth seabed, in fact, is receiving the canvas and is extending as well to the floor, where the installation is set up, consisting of a rough bench – placed to remember the extremely poor concentration camp dorm furniture – and the red and flaming gas bottle (with the words “Never Again“, lightly black pop fonts within a white circle), on which hangs a gas mask. All this because the installation wants to be dynamic, meaning the visitor must not only be “ observer “, but, if he wants it, he can take the gas mask, wear it, sit on the bench, observe from “ inside “ and meditate, protected by the gas mask, that is alluding too – like the reference to the Garden of the Righteous – to the beyond hope of the “ funereal “ remembrance which, if deprived from glows towards a future that calls for better , risks to become rhetoric and eventually sterile. On the bench – as a distinguishing mark of her individual memory, but that becomes then universal – the author is laying down the radio that already belonged to grandfather Guetta and used by him when he hid from the Germans because he was Jewish, to listen to the hope of Radio London. The installation, finally, expands sideways with a series of luggage of that time – more important and more humble, to remind us that not all Jews were rich, as a false stereotype would have us believe – which is witnessing that last one way trip. So, between color spot flashes and sharp triangles and barbed wires of torment, among fragments of thoughts and writings which become immortal memory icons, between tears of tunics from people reduced to a vegetative state and rough “walls” of black and white photos, which welcome the reset and the resurrection of the human soul, with its fears, deep as the abyss of a paralyzing nightmare and with its bright intuitions of hope, Francesca Guetta takes us back to the concreteness of reality without rhetoric, somewhere between reflection, remembrance and hope, observing with no feelings of emasculating revenge what has been the biggest genocide in human history.
Among Michelangelo, Balla and Depero, Sipping the Coffee of Life The works of Francesca Guetta on display in this exhibition at the “Casa di Dante” in Florence have a comprehensive layering and juxtaposition of materials – some three-dimensional – and become true works of “pittosculture,” inserted between small but significant installations which help to reinforce the central theme. In her paintings there is an obvious reference to Italian Pop Art and, above all, what has been defined as the European response to American popular art, namely the Nouveau Réalisme, particularly that which was interpreted by Arman with his ‘accumulations.’ There are, however, substantial differences, which, as we have already discovered in her other shows, give Guetta’s art a quality of absolute originality. The artist, in fact, employs only a few particular objects closely related to the theme that she wishes to develop; she never relies on truly undifferentiated ‘accumulations.’ Her work is a real journey of cultural self-awareness carried out by the artist and possesses a common thread through which the author seeks to inspire us to reflect on a deeper reality. The theme of the mixed media pieces of the first group exhibited here is that of coffee with its varied economic and social meanings. Through fragments of jute sacks, coffee beans, coffee grinders and old mocha machines, artfully arranged on the green or earthy red “carpet”, Francesca Guetta makes us reflect on the possibility of fair trade marketing. This interpretation is supported by the written comments that, from an outward perspective, convey the pop art comic tradition. At the same time, the interpretation is emphasized through the symbolism of the production chain that moves the product from the countries of origin to our own table, materialized in a type of completely secular ‘rosary’ made of roasted coffee beans. She offers an underlying plea to escape the deranged mechanisms of globalizing consumerism, to regain our individuality, without haste, in a context of simple things that can give us peace of mind and the possibility of not being sucked into the whirlpool of numerous urgent commitments which are not actually that important but often overwhelm us. A possible “Paradise” on Earth (sometimes “captured” in surreal compositions) achieved “simply” by sipping a good cup of coffee, perhaps Neapolitan or from the old Artusi recipes, or replaying parts of a song or some Italian pop music that share theese references of coffee and the baggage of bitter-sweet memories carried by entire postwar generations, with subtle implications of irony in certain “comics” inserted in the paintings that “lighten” the conceptual message. The use of photographic fragments is recurrent in Guetta’s works, following the tradition of futurist collage, whose dynamism is also emphasized here by bold and sometimes shrill colors and through the coils of the memorialized ‘crowns’ made of beans (almost like the robes worn by the clergy) sinuously branching off like little streams of life and peace. It is this glowing dynamism that leads us “to grab a coffee” with the Futurists, the subject of her second set of works exhibited here, just like in the hisotrical Florentine café from which the “Giubbe Rosse” were born a little over a hundred years ago, debating progress, ethics and art. In these works of mixed media on canvas flare multi-colored flashes of progress, fireworks that ignite collages made up of famous photos of the Futurism pioneers (photos already symbolized in many paintings by Mario Schifano), old literary magazines and historical newspapers such as “Lacerba” and “Le Figaro”, the avant-garde symbols of the time such as the bicycle, the puffing train, the car or plane (it gives us back some of them through the neo-Dadaist ready-made three-dimensional models applied to the table), and advertising posters, all of which, by now, exist in the collective subconscious. All this, however, as a tribute to a movement for the renewal of the arts and society, a movement that has been instrumental in marking the twentirth century’s break with the past, but nowadays without any unconditional trust or blind optimism in some kind of a triumphant progress. Actually, perhaps Guetta’s works want to keep us from falling in the same traps of the past century. Lastly, the third group, with the tributes to Michelangelo. Once again we see the strong color palette without the nuance of absolute geometry, which refers to the twentieth century avant-gardes (in particular, the classical geometric abstraction of Mondrian and the Post-Painterly Abstraction of Dorazio). The bold colors are attached to a collage of Michelangelo’s works with fragments of photographs, in which the actual strings that hold together the paintings ‘bind’ them in an intense relationship of deep spiritual tension, strong and proud like the Renaissance Master’s temperament and, at the same time, defining relationships and balance, vanishing lines and planes of perspective that serve as the basis of the renaissance “style.” Once again, between flashes of estatic colors and pointy triangles of perspecticval torment, between strings that ‘lift’ the immortal icons, and fragments of jute sacks and rough ‘plaster’ that welcome the delicate frescoes of the soul with its angst and enlightened insights into infinity, we are lead back through Michelangelo’s candid rawness, the concreteness of everyday existence and the aforementioned sacks of coffee, while, between conceptual reflection and makeing light of subjects in a subtly ironic and surreal way, we will sip the coffee of life alonside the immortal and timeless art of the creator of the Sistine Chapel. A vision – that of Francesca Guetta – abstractly idyllic and cultural and, at the same time, realistic and disenchanted, but never existentially pessimistic, in which poetry, art and veiled irony all have the upper hand, playing the victorious role of a secular “evangelist” parable that is entirely modern.
GIAMPAOLO TROTTA
Giampaolo Trotta’s criticism edited for the solo exhibit “Un chicco, un profumo per il mondo… aspettando l’Expo” at the Istituto Agronomico for l’Oltremare di Firenze (the Overseas Agricultural Institute of Florence) – The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, Department of Development Cooperation- 2015 Francesca Guetta is a complex artist, and, as such, it would be reductive to define her simply as a “painter.” Above all else, her works on canvas board mounted on wooden panels, demonstrate a comprehensive layering and juxtaposition of materials – some three-dimensional – to such an extent that we may speak of true works of “pittosculture.” In her paintings there is an obvious reference- due to the color palette and gestural quality of the brushstrokes- to a highly recognizable Italian Pop Art (for example, in her flowers that unconsciously mirror the style of Mario Schifano and his Gigli d’acqua) and to that which has been defined as the European response to American popular art, namely the Nouveau Réalisme, born under the aegis of Pierre Restany and, in particular, the interpretations of Arman with his “accumulations.” There are, however, substantial differences that give Guetta’s art a quality of absolute originality. As we know, the movement, originating in France in the Sixties, took up the theme of the Dadaist ready-made: an pre-made object of everyday utility, isolated from its utilitarian function, and elevated by the artist to become a work of art only through its new contextualization. In Arman’s case- who defined himself as “a painter who makes sculpture”- the inserting of broken objects was used to express the absurd mechanisms of consumerism. The object applied to the painted backdrop, however, could be any thing- smashed violins, tubes of paint, brushes, shoes, dolls, kettles- but the underlying concept hardly changed. Francesca Guetta, on the other hand, utilizes only a few particular objects closely related to the theme that she wishes to develop; she never relies on truly undifferentiated “accumulations.” Her work- highly conceptual and always connected, in this series of creations, with the underlying theme of universal social worth- is a real journey of cultural self-awareness carried out by the artist and possesses a common thread through which the author seeks to inspire us to reflect on a deeper reality. The theme of the five mixed media pieces- presented here in the first “group”- is that of coffee with its varied economic and social meanings. Through fragments of bale (in which roasted coffee beans are conserved) coffee beans themselves, coffee grinders and old mocha machines, artfully arranged on the green or earthy red “carpet”, Francesca Guetta makes us reflect on the possibility of fair trade marketing. This interpretation is supported by the written comments that, from an outward perspective, convey the pop art comic tradition. At the same time, the interpretation is emphasized through the symbolism of the production chain that moves the product from the countries of origin to our own table, materialized in a type of completely secular “rosary” made of roasted coffee beans (see A proposito del Caffè and Macinando… macinando). She offers an underlying plea to escape the deranged mechanisms of globalizing consumerism, to regain our individuality, in a context of simple things that can give us peace of mind: a possible “Paradise” on Earth (sometimes “captured” in surreal compositions) achieved “simply” by sipping a good cup of coffee, perhaps Neapolitan or from the old Artusi recipes, with subtle implications of irony in certain “comics” that “lighten” the conceptual message (see Paradiso… forse, Per una tazzina di caffè or A cuccumella). It is in this last piece, below a cut in the jute of Fontanian ascendency, emerges an image of a coffee plant sculpted into the balustrade belonging to the scale of the Overseas Agronomic Institute, alluding once again to the international cooperation for the development of all Nations. The use of photographic fragments is recurrent in Guetta’s works, following the tradition of futurist collage, whose dynamism is also emphasized here by bold and sometimes shrill colors and through the coils of the memorialized ‘crowns’ made of beans (almost like the robes worn by the clergy) sinuously branching off like little streams of life and peace, like umbilical chords that unite us fraternally. The remaining three works on display, however, engage with the more canonical styles of acrylic painting. A painting, as described previously, for masses of color from which derive- as foreseen- the figurative form of flowers, in a volcanic explosion of fiery resplendent gestural art. Speranza is a piece that we can almost interpret as a sort of trait d’union between painting and collage among this last series of Naturalia and the “pittosculture” of the previously mentioned group. A colorful kaleidoscope of images to give us hope that pure nature can once again triumph over the degradation of our contemporary cities, that from wastefulness and pollution a flower can be reborn, with poetic accents of the “flower children”, those “flower children” that succumbed to the logic of consumerism, that hippy utopia universalized by the winking suggestion to the idealness of the city of Humanism, to which the photograph of the San Gallo-styled Tavola di Urbino refers. A reflection on Nature that, nowadays, is all too often “restrained” by man, which seems symbolized by the work itself, ‘plastered’ on the canvas, a nature that is obstructed and suffocated by urban overbuilding. A vision – that of Francesca Guetta – realistic and disenchanted, but not existentially pessimistic, in which poetry, art and veiled irony all have the upper hand, playing the protagonists in a secular “evangelist” parable that is entirely modern.
GIAMPAOLO TROTTA
“Opera: Ma cosa hai messo nel caffè It’s a sound opera ! It’s funny to combine two Arts, a sounding and visual one, and in this performance it is possible to see, to hear, and … to enjoy! The idea of the composition was inspired by a song written and sung by Riccardo del Turco. In the opera we can notice that from the sounding gunnysack thrown diagonally to the right side (according to who enjoys the opera) and that is representing music (we can see a green musical note placed as an identifying brand), is bursting out: Coffee! Love! Poison?! The grinder, a historical symbol of the exciting black beverage is the visual coffee representative: the shape and its being is rendered by coffee beans, which are spread in the opera over a violet background … poison?! Either the song with its recurring melody or the yellow comic strip in the opera itself are both helping us when it tells us: “… but what did you put in the coffee that I I’ve drank over to your place? Now, there is something different in me. .. “. Poison, may be, is the doubt that is grasping even the main character of the song, but, a sweet poison … love! Represented by red little hearts which are dumped over there too, in the movement of the song, which are not ground by the grinder that grinds coffee, but not hearts! Coffee beans are also at the top of the opera, but now they are set up so to form either an anchor or an arrow falling down, showing the centre of the opera. The anchor indicates that after having drunk this potion (coffee), one is anchored to love (witnessed, reiterated by the red hearts); if instead, an arrow was represented, this would indicate that the dart of love has already been drunk. Even white flowers protruding from the gunnysack, are representing the surrendering to the fact which means that once the coffee is drunk, it has accomplished its prodigious duty. We just have to open all our senses and immerse ourselves in this …… olfactive picture! ” Opera: Caffè nero bollente This multiple material composition is an artistic opera set to music, because, inspired by the homonymous song sung by Fiorella Mannoia. The background which is from an intense yellow color recalls the Sun, which takes shape, through coffee beans, on the left side in relation to those who watch the opera. In the center of the opera, we can notice a jacket, made out of the gunnysack, the best container of freshly harvested coffee, which opens, protruding a coffee pot shaped like a bow tie, and three buttons also composed by coffee beans. The jacket is also decorated on both sides (right and left) by green flowers in style. A white flower, but not stylized, we find it too at the top of the composition. In the center of the creation, on the left side in relation to who is observing, we can see a purple comic strip that says “… and I’m killing time drinking hot black coffee in this nest warmed by a patient sun.” Coffee is boiling and black because heated by the primary source of heat: the Sun which is placed in the upper left side in the opera compared to the observer, so that the protagonists are the hot black coffee and the Sun, since it is the primary source of heat able to make black coffee hot! ” Criticism written by Claudia Di Cera on the occasion of National Art Exhibition “Synaesthesia – The art of notes and colors of music” held at the Accademia Musicale Mediterranea, Taranto,
CLAUDIA DI CERA
“Criticism from Alessandra Macchitella to Terezin inserted in the catalogue “ Premio Taras per l’Arte “ , 2017: “A pyjama can be tortured. This is demonstrated by the lines striped through pain. Like a sad curtain, they come down on one side and on the other, only black can tell what it was. In the middle, the white, the light, yellow and red, fluttering butterflies, symbols of a freedom that was lost with humanity. To deny it: a barbed wire. ”
ALESSANDRA MACCHITELLA
Criticism from Alessandra Macchitella to B7456 inserted in the catalogue “ Premio Taras per l’Arte “, 2017:” A star that was shield becomes jail. The black and decisive background, as the history of man can become, a blood-red line slices apart a wire barbed symbol. On the left, as two overlaped triangles, writings and documents, normality crushed by faces who are asking “is that a man? “. On the right, photos, filed and ready at the entrance to the end of the world. “.
ALESSANDRA MACCHITELLA
Criticism from Giorgio Falossi inserted in the volume “ Da Lucio Fontana al Giubileo di Papa Francesco 2016″ Ed. Il Quadrato: ” Francesca Guetta’s painting is marked by a research of historical representation and social ransom. The picture has the symbols of a lived and known reality that should be shaken because it tends towards the “not remembered” for laziness, greed or convenience. And here is the art that is not only a sign and color, but is idea, thought, and solicitation. The artist can hear and sneak away at the first opportunity; Francesca Guetta at the forefront gives power to voice, adds the writing that doesn’t lead to misunderstanding through dubious interpretations. Some symbol complete the work: barbed wire, coffee beans, flags, yellow star. Not only artworks but framework patterns and sign warps on human values, today like yesterday, so often flagrantly betrayed and trampled. A harsh language that states through compositional achievements of symbols that involve not only the power but also the humanity that we all represent. Francesca Guetta once again brings us back not so much to the painting but to an artistic universe, to the global message, not to illustrations weight down in various ways by bondage, but the interweaving of patterns, objects, flavors and smells, which combined together, are representing the events of a bent humanity, humiliated by the pain of living. Agile but rigorous shots always put on foreground, the artist uses the surface to stretch out in bright light objects, colored traces, reasonings and thoughts “.
GIORGIO FALOSSI
Paolo Levi’s critical review reported on Primo Trofeo Internazionale Arte Impero, Parigi – Vienna – Roma catalogue, Ea Publisher: ” In Francesca Guetta’s works, the technique of collage is presented with extreme elegance and harmony: color, different kinds of objects, fabrics , texts are layed out on the base transmitting a ludic message, that at the same time causes the observer to reflect on the contemporary world. A vibrant material warp stretches out in fragmented choreographies on the base, where written texts, everyday objects, newspaper cutouts are juxtaposed to the uniform and vivid backgrounds, generating a very personal language processed by the artist that enhances the expressive potentialities of the different used components. Along her pathway of research and experimentation, Francesca Guetta reveals details that come from the subconscious. These works look like psychic maps where material vibrations are lining out the mysterious trail of the creative impulse, leaving to the viewer the task of rebuilding the connections inherent to the narrative of her collages “.
PAOLO LEVI
Criticism from Arianna Fantuzzi and Anthea Notarangelo with the supervision of Gianni Dunil inserted in the catalogue Esposizione Triennale di Arti Visive a Roma 2017 – Aeterna, Start Edizioni : “ The florentine artist, Francesca Guetta began her career in the 2000s, studying painting at the C.U.E. A. of Florence. Later she perfected her technique in contact with several teachers, among which Andrea Sole Costa, Aida Teran and Giuseppe Ciccia. Her paintings combine to the strongly materical aspect an ordered nature as opposed to the chaos of the elements through a sober and calibrated arrangement. The serious study of composition leads Guetta to make paintings in which dominates the equilibrium of forms, followed by the choice of colors, always pretty lightened. Her works range from figurative to abstract, witnessing the expressive vivacity of the artist. The collages and the assemblages, in particular, combine elements taken from reality and able to return a possible image of the world, reelaborated through the fusion of materials. In “Puzzle”, Francesca Guetta enacts the succession of different shapes, tied together with a gray mortar that captures the rounded edges. On the uneven background stand out the different shades of pastel colors (grey, white, yellow, pink) that boost with their presence the positive perception of the artwork. Chromatic mosaic elements seem to find the own direction in the center of the work, where smaller and disorderly elements are collected, ready to be embedded to others.
ARIANNA FANTUZZI and ANTHEA NOTARANGELO with the supervision of GIANNI DUNIL
Critique written by Prof. Rosario Pinto and inserted in the art history text “Fra tradizione e innovazione. Movimenti ed idee dell’arte contemporanea dall’Impressionismo al Duemila “, volume IV, ed. Napoli Nostra, 2018: “In drawing an introductory profile of Francesca Guetta’s personality, Giampaolo Trotta points out that” it would be reductive to simply define as a painter “this artist, since above all her works on canvas panel mounted on a board, in fact, present an articulated stratification and juxtaposition of materials… to the point that we can speak of real painted relief scultures”. The proof of a creative practice that is developed by our artist as an opportunity that offers itself to deploy a multiple and complex experience on an existential level constitutes the basic element for an anchorage to historical reasons which, as it is possible to observe, critics see in the sign of a ‘popartist’ impermanence. All this is very important and deserves an in-depth investigation which is all the more appropriate if above all we weigh up some evaluations that the whole of our artist’s production activity suggests and manifests. For example, our artist’s willingness emerges to practice a painting with a generous informal breath, carried out, moreover, with a production option that does not hesitate to turn to the privilege of nuclear-branded resolutions as we can observe in acrylic works such as Bridled Nature or Among the Flowers. Paintings like the ones that we have just mentioned are particularly important to have a very significant measure of the horizon expansion that the work of our artist manifests, having the ability to place herself in a content sphere with a profiling of absolute interest and certainly in some way more advanced with respect to those Italian-style ‘popart’ orientations which, after all, her works could also be considered to be – and by virtue of a sort of heralded setting aside of the content consistencies as a reward for a lightening of the organic and inspissated meaningfulness of thought – they could also be understood we repeat, as anticipatory manifestations of that climate of abandonment of the commitment of art that would then tragically hit the artistic happenings with the ‘postmodern’ season. And so, having to take into account the fact that Guetta’s creative activity, also for purely chronological reasons, develops throughout the temporal continuation of the first Italian ‘pop-art’ season, it may be useful to underline how the deviation of our artist’s production from the Schifano or Dei Festa Roman climate , for example, (net, as far as the latter is concerned, of some specific sensitivities still typical of the climate of ‘Denunciation Realism’) constitutes a basic reason for the consideration of her creative research as an activity of absolute interest for the originality and proactive autonomy it discloses. And it might not be incongruous to also valorize in the activity of this artist a sort of unspoken abstractive scan, which is proposed as a propositional gradient of a silent normative disposition capable of acting from the recesses of creative inspiration, coming to provide a psychological standardization that acts in substitute for a wisely marginalized prediction of conscience “.
ROSARIO PINTO
“The keyword in Francesca Guetta’s work is multiplicity, either in terms of the used techniques, combining to the most traditional painting the polymaterial collage and the assembling of daily recovered materials, or as regards the evoked imaginary, ranging from the naturalistic subject transfigured in abstract key (Fiori) or reinterpreted in an environmentalist optic (La natura imbrigliata) to the characters of popular culture (Homage to George Michael) or of the artistic world (Omaggio a Michelangelo) told with an iconic-chromatic language. Even though being works perfectly autonomous in their meaning, their common point is the creative process evolution since ever opened to technical experimentation and to linguistic hybridization, either operating a cross between genres, or trespassing from one genre to another by means of technique. Not less important is the role of color, called to “aggregate” the different expressive levels and of meaning either within individual works (NY2017) or in a more choral manner among the various cycles of its production.” Critic feature written by Daniela Pronesti on the occasion of the personal exhibition “Dialoghi in divenire” held at Simultanea Spazi d’Arte, Florence.
DANIELA PRONESTI’
Critique written by Giorgio Falossi and included in the Volume “Leonardo 500 anni di Arte”, Il Quadrato Editions by Giorgio Falossi and Lorenzo Cipriani, 2019: “Gesture, sign and colour are all elements that concur in Francesca Guetta’s painting to the need to communicate in maximum freedom her intense participation in the modulations of Nature, in the progress of human civilization, in the hopes of a future. There is a rhythm in these works. The sign engraves the spaces, the light is obtained from white in a composition that is also harmony, order and invention, while dealing with a theme of world disorder. A search for a quick and effective language with a painting that tends towards simplification and essentiality because time is over. Francesca Guetta paints drifting fragments, broken bonds and devastated landscapes. Her painting evokes, not inveighs. Bridled colours and dirty whites in an intonation in which the fragments are measured in a chase, in an alternation of spaces and that little use of blue is destined not for the swallows in the sky but for the migrants in the sea. Details presented with careful and real foresight, accompanied by random writings of understandable words that sink like wounds, like deep cuts, into the bark of trees, into the canvas of the world.”
GIORGIO FALOSSI
“The keyword in Francesca Guetta’s work is multiplicity, either in terms of the used techniques, combining to the most traditional painting the polymaterial collage and the assembling of daily recovered materials, or as regards the evoked imaginary, ranging from the naturalistic subject transfigured in abstract key (Fiori) or reinterpreted in an environmentalist optic (La natura imbrigliata) to the characters of popular culture (Homage to George Michael) or of the artistic world (Omaggio a Michelangelo) told with an iconic-chromatic language. Even though being works perfectly autonomous in their meaning, their common point is the creative process evolution since ever opened to technical experimentation and to linguistic hybridization, either operating a cross between genres, or trespassing from one genre to another by means of technique. Not less important is the role of color, called to “aggregate” the different expressive levels and of meaning either within individual works (NY2017) or in a more choral manner among the various cycles of its production.” Critic feature written by Daniela Pronesti on the occasion of the personal exhibition “Dialoghi in divenire” held at Simultanea Spazi d’Arte, Florence.
Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea De Agostini 2019
Critique included in the Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea De Agostini 2020 with the scientific coordination of Daniele Radini Tedeschi and Stefania Pieralice: “A Florentine artist who has always had a particular attraction to the world of art. She begins studying painting in 2004 at C.U.E.A. in Florence and subsequently deepens her artistic training, attending courses and workshops of Florentine painters. Francesca Guetta’s style is cultured and transversal, ranging from futurist collage to Nouveau Realisme declined in the accumulating version of Arman. She develops a non-absolute abstraction, which shatters the idea of a unitary vision representative of reality and from which a conceptualism emerges that holds the ranks of a new meaningful communication. She takes up the sacredness of Duchamp’s readymades, placing them in a functional context, renewed in their meaning. For example, when spools of cotton appear on a panel, the visual choice is not casual or an end to the mere celebration of objects, but rather is configured as a reminder of the importance of a city as a centre of the textile industry. In her works, the destruction of the figure does not always become an iconic zeroing, since the latter remains jagged and uneven on the two- dimensional surface. Through fragments of reality, which are related according to a new order, resulting directly from an inner feeling, she wants to focus attention on relevant ethical and social values. The result is expressed through creations with an overwhelming evocative force that range from the naturalistic to the popular theme, to reach the artistic world. Colour acts as a deus ex machina for the intersection of the different expressive levels, which converge in a single communication channel “.
Atlante dell’Arte Contemporanea De Agostini 2020
Critique written by Daniela Pronestì on the series “La natura imbrigliata ” published in the magazine La Toscana Nuova – year 3 – number 8 – September 2020, critical eye section, on the occasion of the collective exhibition Racconti di fine estate at the Terme Beach Resort in Punta Marina (Ra): “Humiliated, violated, reduced to mere dumping of waste; this is the nature to which Francesca Guetta’s works refer to to narrate the drama and at the same time imagine a different future. An acknowledgment capable of breaking the bonds within which the natural environment is “bridled”, like a slave reduced to chains by man’s arrogance. Complex creations, those of Guetta, layered in meanings as well as in the variety of materials recovered and assembled by the artist to symbolize, precisely through an arduous formal elaboration, how difficult it is to raise collective awareness on the environmental issue. The first to be “bridled” in the plot that shrounds the work – fragments of bark, aluminum and colour placed in such a way as to recall clods of earth and stretches of water – are us, each of us, every time we engage in harmful behaviour for the environment, regardless of the damage done above all to ourselves. “Bridled” is nature, a prisoner, as it is, of the effects of savage exploitation, the victim of constant abuse that triggers a process with no return. A more topical theme than ever before which the artist has been dealing with for some time, lending the experience gained over the years in painting to the formulation of a hybrid language, a combination of form and colour, recovery and combination of natural and artificial materials gathered together to signify the action of man opposed to the free creativity of nature. Works to be explored with the gaze, following the red thread that traps and at the same time preserves these fragments of nature from any external aggression. The function of this expressive element, in fact, is ambivalent: on the one hand, it evokes what denies and suffocates life, the deadly embrace of a destructive force; on the other hand it protects the body of the work and enlivens it as if it were lymph. We find it in all the works of the series “La natura imbrigliata “, as if to sanction the conceptual and stylistic continuity of a project in which most of the experiments conducted so far by the artist are condensed, reaching maturity, integrating different mediums and expressive codes. In this case, the use of the hybrid form of painted relief sculpture allows her to obtain effects of verisimilitude aimed at highlighting the mystification of the concept of nature in a society that increasingly confuses truth and artifice, authenticity and fiction. For Francesca Guetta there are no other paths to embark on, therefore, other than the one that leads to rediscovering a deep contact with oneself and with the surrounding environment to restore the indissoluble and ancient bond between man and nature “.
DANIELA PRONESTI’
Review by Professor Diego Fusaro on the series “La natura imbrigliata” (“Harnessed Nature”) drafted for the General Catalog of artists selected by Precis Arte 2020, volume edited by Diego Fusaro and Lucia La Sorsa, Publisher: Print Me S.r.l.: “The artist sets the tone of her convincing work by playing on the link between geometric figures and symbolism. The visual effect is commendable, and her use of chromatic tones is impressive, especially the use of red in the geometric shapes. Viewing the work as a whole, which appears mature and impressive in all its productions, almost seems to recall the Kantian distinction between a natura materialiter spectate and a natura formaliter spectate. On the one hand, the observer sees nature as it is materially, with its shapes and its gaudy colors, with its material entities and with its concrete determinations. While on the other hand, thanks to the geometric lines, the viewer can see the nature that Kant calls formaliter spectata, seen on a formal and geometric level.”
DIEGO FUSARO
Critique written by Sandro Serradifalco printed in the bimonthly art periodical Art Now, number VI, year III, November/December 2020 and also used in the context of the television program “Italian Excellence – Stories of Artists, the difference that makes the difference” aired on March 23rd, 2021 on Odeon TV (channel 177): “The artist’s informal compositions describe magmatic stratifications of color where fabrics and other materials are grafted together with a strong symbolic appeal. The artist’s dense stroke creates overlapping striations, with large backgrounds that reveal an instinctive but predesigned gestural expressiveness. Subtle shades declined in brown animate the soft lines drawn by Guetta, which effectively reproduce the infinite range of colors that belong to the earth, where the use of multi-materialism gives sculptural depth to some details. Minimal in its lines and colors, these warm-toned works reveal the cervices from which the internal energy of our planet flows forth, at some moments silent and bearer of fertility, at others, violent and unstoppable in its destructive impetuosity. The symbolism is clearly evident in visual metaphors that remind us of the inherent need in each person to communicate and transmit our feelings through the paths of poetry. They are also historical testimonies of the recent past that have led to a broader and more complex form of reflection. The artist therefore reflects on the essential role of art even in the age of technology, demonstrating how it is still the most effective tool for transmitting our emotions.”
SANDRO SERRADIFALCO
Dr. Mara Ferloni’s critical mention included in the Volume Art Best Seller! 2021 published by the International Gallery Association “Il Collezionista” (“The Collectionist”) on the occasion of the Art Best Seller! exhibition in 2021 at the Bellini Museum in Florence: “The works made of multi-material and aluminum show a particular symbolic expressive synthesis and a modern interpretation that aims to highlight the environmental problems in which man “harnesses nature.”
MARA FERLONI
Critique written by Silvia Ranzi and published in Pègaso magazine, a quarterly magazine of culture, art and ways of life founded in 1929 by Ugo Ojetti, N. 211 September-December 2021, and entitled “Francesca Guetta, Iconografie Simboliche” (“Francesca Guetta, Symbolic Iconography”): “Francesca Guetta, originally from Florence where she lives and works, has to her credit an artistic career of over twenty years of brilliant productive focus, studded with participation in important art competitions and glowing reviews, both in Italy and abroad. She has been the recipient of awards, has presented work in public and private collections and in macro-thematic solo shows, and has been reviewed in more than one hundred catalogs, gaining the appreciation of critics and the public in prestigious galleries and historical locations throughout the country, through the use of cultural elements proposed in her eclectic vision. Her original stylistic poetics reveal her adherence to a kaleidoscopic and multifaceted aesthetic for revisited ancestry, animated by versatile inner urgencies. Her artistic practice, which also includes installations, is both conceptual and pragmatic at the same time, marrying the fascination for twenties century avant-garde in a range of styles from expressionist action painting to Futurist dynamism with vivid colors and intermittent vanishing points and backgrounds embellished with collage cutouts, with a reliance on the appeal of ready-made Pop deriving from the New Dada movement, favoring the rendering of pictorial sculptural two-dimensionality. Her work at the personal exhibition entitled “Coffee with Michelangelo and the Futurists” (November 2015) at the ancient Society of Artists “Casa di Dante” (Dante’s Home”), her ability is demonstrated through charismatic flair in a dialogue across various eras based on the cultural climate present in each of its brilliant works: Michelangelo’s Renaissance Humanism in its plastic power dialectically meets the Futurist representations of prevailing industrialization, dominated by speed, in search of the new, in the emblematic alternation comparing past and present. The informal multi-material melting pot implemented in her ideations, between sentiment and reason, unite the symbolism and gesturalism of the pigments in magmatic stratifications with variegated colors and stylized textures. They are supported by figural insertions from contemporary references, generating original combine-painting which is proactive toward the sociological appropriations of the environment and ethical-social themes aimed to sensitize the conscience of the postmodern person. Recently, her aesthetic factuality has been devoted toward interpreting the primitive origins of the four elements of the sensitive universe, in homage to primordial matter, as can be observed in the work presented in a personal mini-exhibition at the festival of the arts “Terra Madre” (“Motherland”) (2019) to promote the protection of nature against technological abuses and the depletion of planetary resources. In addition, her work voices the denunciation of feminicide, speaks about modern migratory phenomena, and lastly, in participating in the important exhibition “Il Segno della Memoria” (“The Mark of Memory”) (2016) at the Limonaia of Villa Vogel in Florence, she defends the inclusive values of peace in the face of war crimes, persecutions and genocides and the human tragedy of the Holocaust. As an authentic ambassador of the identifying value of art in the free expression of its adopted codes, her creations capture the attention of the viewer with works containing iconography rich in formal symbolism of the fecundity of inner aspirations, deserving of critic Sandro Serradifalco’s fitting definition of “visual metaphors.”
SILVIA RANZI
Review by Dr. Iff published in IconArt Magazine, in the Art Notes section: “Conceptual and material, social and supportive, referencing pop trends but with forays into Futurism… Francesca Guetta’s art is a real and original explanation of an intimate consideration on the contemporary world and its socio-economic dynamics that make twentieth century artistic currents a reference for elaborating her singular and personal language. The artist speaks of her vision of reality through an interconnection between different materials and the themes addressed, juxtaposing the elements in order to find a playful and similar correspondence of signs and meanings that ultimately lead to reflection. This can be observed in “Macinando… macinando,” (“Grinding… grinding”) a work that belongs to the coffee series, in which the composition is built with a clear dialogic and exhortative intent. On the canvas, colors, materials and elements are arranged like graphic signs on the paper: words made of matter and color layered on the surface communicate a social message of cooperation and eco-sustainable development. Retracing jargon that evokes a futurist matrix with influences of pop and the evocative power of comics, the work appear Iffs as a sort of three-dimensional collage, where the constituent elements range from the present physicality of fragrant coffee beans to a real grinder, to the clippings of images of paper on a background in which cardboard and jute stand out in a chromatic encounter. Everything contributes to bringing to light the symbolic representation of fair-trade supply chain, production and marketing of coffee. Thus, the image of the basket of freshly picked coffee seeds and the hand holding roasted beans evoke the small businesses of coffee producing countries, while the grinder represents the expression of European markets.”
Dr Iff
Critical text by Ivan Caccavale about Francesca Guetta: “The prodromes of Francesca Guetta’s artistic activity fall within the channel of a figurative realism in the traditional sense, while moving away from it she conceives and embodies various stylistic features, from time to time, associating them with an expanse of conceptual experience. Between ready-made and ex novo creations, her painting becomes painting-sculpture, revealing a strong and indissoluble bond with technical manual skill, creative and refined, that is capable of weaving valid relationships with the text. In these orchestrations, in which the chromatic treatment and the way paint is laid down communicate with the material (or rather, they become it), there is no lack of recycled materials which refer to the elements of earth and water. The use of fluid art, characterized by a nuanced and “mediated” palette (despite the automatisms implicit in this technique), serves to express the emerging states of mind. She greatly employs aluminum, plaster, zinc, the latter of which is used for unexpected Luminist lighting capable of giving movement to the canvas, as in “Tra l’edera” (“Between the Ivy”). The critical eye opens to the realty in which she is inserted and through which she moves, challenging issues which are therefore of undoubted symbolic and social value. Thus, objects of daily use become instrumental in explaining an idea or in bringing a problem or urgency to the attention of the observer. In some cases, the works oscillate between messages of danger and hope: danger in reference to stubborn exploitation perpetrated to the detriment of the terrestrial ecosystem, resulting in terrible consequences, already known to all, demonstrated by increasing frequency and destructivity; and hope because, despite everything, the creation of the Earth is founded upon a perfect balance, offering its intrinsic message of beauty and the possibility of liberation and “redemption” to those who know how to grasp it. The work shows an explosive and florid nature through the chromo-formal organization that Guetta uses, becoming the second term of a manichean duality, dense with poetry and lyrically vibrant, an answer to the anthropized and cemented landscape to which people are accustomed nowadays. There is no shortage of tributes to the past, to eminent figures of the Florentine Renaissance, who walked the same streets as Guetta (in fact, she is a native of the Tuscan capital), and to movements of the twentieth century. Thus, cut-out figures are inserted into real scenographies, following the phases of a process of objectification of the image, from idea to reality. These works lay the foundation for the stimulating involvement of the audience, for which they aim to revive and/or awaken its interest in reference to certain topics. Her ambition toward the multiform is also quite evident, with a particular tendency toward the fragment: fragments which, in their individual and autonomous symbolic significance, contribute to the general ideological construction, that each element- not repeated and unable to be reiterated- is both sufficient in and of itself and also functionally contributes to the overall design. Therefore, it is disiecta membra (scattered fragments in Latin) and not mosaic tiling, whose execution depends on the uniform repetition, in a paratactic sense, of the overall work. The artist can be compared with the poetics of Tano Festa, fundamentally for two aspects: confetti and the ready-made. In fact, Guetta’s insertions on the support material could resemble confetti, but while in the work of the Tuscan artist everything is part of a well-balanced and calibrated game, in Festa’s case it is undeniably a voluntary recourse to spontaneity, aligned with the jubilant atmosphere of the Sixties, free from shackles and devoted to expressive freedom. Furthermore, while the Roman master makes use of objects without and/or deprived of functionality (shutters, mirrors, armoires, etc.), whose nonsense acquires a symbology and an analytical and metaphysical declination, for the contemporary artist presented here they are always loaded with meaning, coherent of what they intend to communicate.”
IVAN CACCAVALE
Review by Dr. Maria Araceli Meluzzi written for the General Catalog of artists selected by Precis Arte 2021, volume edited by Maria Araceli Meluzzi and Lucia La Sorsa, published by Print Me S.r.l.: “Poetess of matter in all its facets, Guetta is an artist of the most authentic multi-material style. Although at first glance the subtext appears hermeneutic, suddenly the lines that compose it gradually acquire meaning. The symbology is clear, and the climax evident and full of meaning. The colors are the protagonists of a disturbing feeling made up of oxymoronic signs. The subtle aim is undoubtedly that of imprinting concepts into the mind of the viewer that are harnessed but full of light in their meaning, embellished by the pioneer vein of the artist who still has a lot to say and to recycle.”
MARIA ARACELI MELUZZI
Review by Professor Diego Fusaro edited for the monograph Francesca Guetta “Talents” for the Art Series by Professor Diego Fusaro, organized by the Precis Arte of La Sorsa Lucia, 2022: An explosion of primary and complementary colors breaks the shackles, harnesses and laces of the glossy patina, the product of an ultra-capitalist society, allowing the passage from the outer surface to inside the eye of the storm. An intricate Dante-esque forest of material tangles and saturated colors in which one can identify the cornerstone, which becomes the absolute protagonist in the works of the Florentine artist Francesca Guetta, both in works in which she is present and in those in which she is absent in physical form. However, they are metaphorically translated into material applications and effigies of idols in a sort of incomplete and reversible chemical reaction; reagent and product in an osmotic gradient that moves the gaze from the concept to the object and vice versa, creating an innovative and sustainable subject, as it is conceptually “recycled” by lessons of the great masters of now totally outdated modern art. In the vortex of Heideggerian memory, the sensibility expressed in the material is deposited like stardust, cosmic debris and windswept souls, lustful of an entirely pop consumerism. The medium chosen by the artist becomes the focal point, the pivot hidden inside, the primitive archetype on which the foundations of modernity are built as if in a narrative dream in which Banksy graffitied together with Magritte after arriving in a post-class lesson by Duchamp, sitting comfortably on his urinals which hang on the wall, straddling the generation gap on the unstructured and anonymous back of the decapitated equines of the oppositional Cattelan of which he lends the hierarchical and chaotic form of his megalomaniac idea of installation which, translated into the eclectic and polyphonic language of the Florentine artist, translates into a complex perspective scheme guided by straight and geometric lines of force with a futurist flavor, all seasoned with that dynamism so dear to Boccioni and Carrà. The liaison, the meaning, the common thread that binds, harnesses and constrains volumetric and natural fragments on the flat canvas is precisely the synthesis of the whole conceptual world: the poetics of the artist Guetta, expressed in a New Dadaism more regal than the king, cut from magazines as if in a new version La Guernica, incarnate and wrapped, in the religious sense of the term, in the faces of sanctified celebrities. Explanatory captions are surrendered and the mantra-like aphorism of the “have a good day” on display in the best urban cafes is aimed at reminding us that, in that rare moment of pause, we should take the time to observe and appreciate the essence of everything, of what really matters, leaving behind us the frenetic tornado of everyday life, not a place where analysis and discernment are canceled but where the collective and personal conscience is turned upside down and lost until it returns to the original Kaos, producing giant Titans that impose themselves against the defenseless people, sung by the Adelchi choir, the conscience, collapsing in the sleep of reasoning, long-ago imagined in ancient times by Goya who had engraved in his “passing fancy” a warning to the coming peoples against the nightmare of contemporary obscurantism from which, without a critical look, it would be impossible to distance themselves and to disagree.
DIEGO FUSARO
Critical text by Ivan Caccavale on the occasion of Francesca Guetta’s solo exhibition entitled “La natura imbrigliata” (“Harnessed Nature”) at the White Cube Gallery in Veroli: Pino Pascali, with his intent to revitalize the individual object and with the frequent use of simple materials, aimed to configure the work of art as a real sensitive experience, with the approach of an artisan, of an author of actions: in light of this, he can rightly be considered a forerunner of Arte Povera. The florentine Francesca Guetta, consciously or not, as an artist with western DNA, italian in particular, demonstrates a certain tangency with this important historicized figure, certainly ideologically, though with that typical characterization that makes each of us an inimitable and unrepeatable unicum. Pascali used to say: “I try to do what I like. After all, doing is the only system that suits me “. A strong link to manual skills, therefore, clearly evident, for example, in the creation of the so-called False sculture, made from wood, canvas, steel wool, straw, raffia; at the same time, Guetta gets us used to compositions made with the use of recycled and reused material, in which a not inconsiderable social commitment is perceived. She confronts herself with the real contingent and questions herself, reading and decoding messages and communications from the reality she lives in, through the mass media; her works sometimes suggest, sometimes affirm. The cycle La Natura imbrigliata takes origins and shape in consideration of this and grabs attention for the coherence that binds every work of it. We use to decline the adjective “harnessed” according to a negative meaning: common thought, in fact, calls to mind something that prevents normal locomotion activities, an obstacle to action. In this case, natural processes and mechanisms are inhibited, continuously altered by increasingly invasive interventions by work of the human being. However, that omnipresent red string, the stylistic code of the serie, which links and joins together the various sections of every work of this genre, almost seems to reveal a protective intent, of safeguard. Red, therefore, a bright color, symbol of love, of passion (from the Latin passio, suffering), but at the same time associated with the idea of alarm, of emergency; it reveals a certain will, of the artist, of preservation of the world ecosystem, but also of an evident concern, or rather restlessness, linked to environmental troubles so urgent that humanity is called to resolve in tight and pressing times. Thus framed, these works follow one another paratactically in front of the observer, however demonstrating their own autonomy in the general economy, with a virtuous game of knots, now simple now complex, able to give life to floral and geometric shapes.
IVAN CACCAVALE
Critique edited by Dr. Stefania Pieralice draw up on occasion of the synopsis of the work To Ukraine hosted at the National Pavilion Grenada at 59. Biennial of Venice Art: “Celestial privacy, for the big dilemmas in the veins, the weaves Francesca Guetta, not just any artist but a woman from the passion touched, that feels on herself a vocation on mankind. And the Beauty that Our presents us does not like compromises or aesthetic flattery or tin idols again connoted by pure hypocrisy. She, through the art, creates peace posters, wonder and love. And To Ukraine unearth the recklessness of the current, the suffering. The sky is shattered, in the vault, from air strikes. Of the prosperous cornfields all that remains is debris, the bands of the national flag are dismembered, the fragmented colors are lost looking for a bit broken by the war. At the disorganized rotation of the fragments – almost synecdoche of houses reduced to rubble – it contrasts the tightening, overhanging and uniformly black of the barbed wire which imprisons in a grid, making vain the “bravery”, the “peace”, the “hope” and at the same time hides the perpetrated “horror”. It is the pain that resonates in the canvas to anticipate the message; it is the failure of illusions to deliver man into the arms of Nothingness, although in this case it’s not about art but of yearning prayer. And then the work stages the desolation of a battlefield, burial of coffins among the rubble, of expectations and breathings of dead without speech and alive who will never know what life is.”
STEFANIA PIERALICE
Critique edited by Gastone Ranieri Indoni draw up on occasion of personal exhibition “ Un coacervo di intriganti stilemi “ headed at the gallery La Bomboniera dell’Arte in Rome and published on the bimonthly FMS International Art Magazine n° 66-67/22: “The picturesque descriptions of Francesca Guetta while in large part they express an exponential ecological urgency, in other themes and styles, even informal or collages, they enjoy surprising impromptu performances. There is that of the defense of defaced Nature, reported fixed thought and since long taken into account and that as the development of as many diversified themes in polymateric equally congenial to Her. All her saying and doing gives Her a rare consistency. Through a pictorial dialectic enriched by a lively expression of color and the vivid amalgam of a mixed technique of unpredictable materials, the sought-after functionality aimed at denouncing the latent danger of an abuse is significantly increased as far as Nature is concerned but also the attention that she in turn pays to the great themes of Humanity despite the multiplication of many widespread false alarms. The aim remains to avert with her paintings “J’accuse”, in the first place the ignorance of a couple of fundamental concepts: the first is that of the immensity of a Nature that, as much as it can succumb, hardly suffers forever the violence of man, as unfortunately we are warned by the increasingly frequent disasters we are witnessing. The second one varies in the immense knowable of human history, it doesn’t matter whether historical or everyday, where She like to emphasize her assent or dissent in the most forthright way as would enforce the most fervent Florentine Sibyl of culture.”
GASTONE RANIERI INDONI