NURTURE THE UNEXPECTED. ART AS A TOOL
Francesca Rossi, born in 1993, lives and works in Milan, the city where she studied, first attending the Liceo Artistico and later the Politecnico. After graduating in Architecture, she approaches the world of graphics, thus starting to express herself artistically with the collage technique.
This rookie artist, who is exhibiting for her first solo show, has always felt Art as a tool. This is also demonstrated by the tattoo engraved on her right arm showing the words that give the title to the exhibition, “Art is the weapon”: Art seen as a weapon used to fight what we can define as the uneasiness of modern times. This incision on her skin is a real social act for Francesca, in the meaning set out in Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theses: a sign which describes an impulse that is not only individual, but with deep social connotations and implications. And which expresses the need for this young creative to reflect on the contemporary world, on its stereotypes, its achievements as well as its constraints and limitations.
Rossi’s analysis, sometimes conducted methodically, other times intuitively, can fuel a self-reflexive dimension that takes the form of works that are real metaphysical experiments created to awaken consciences.
With her digital collages, Francesca Rossi presents us with the result of her investigation carried out on the elements characterizing our Western culture. These elements are also theorized by Charles Taylor, an internationally renowned philosopher who identifies into individualism and the primacy of instrumental reason the motivations that lead human beings nowadays to surrender to a sort of “soft despotism” with a consequent loss of awareness.
The human figure, always protagonist of the scene in the artist’s works, appears powerless, subjected to a deterministic force preventing any freedom of choice. Subjected to a superior technological power. A big eye that sees and controls everything, a visual element recurring in the artist’s production.
The clever selection of images, coming both from photographs from the 1950s and from modern graphics, generally in black and white or soft colors, makes each work aesthetically vintage,nostalgic and, at the same time, ironic and audacious.
There are many influences between art and architecture in Francesca’s work. In fact, in each creation it is possible to see an element or object that brings us back to an icon of the past: sometimes buildings, other times design objects. For instance, in the series ‘Utopia’, the images tell the story of a woman whose figure is taken from the advertisement of the chair “Superleggera” by Gio Ponti.
Inspired by the greats of the past such as Marcel
Duchamp, Damien Hirst, Piero Manzoni, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Francesca Rossi lets her imagination go by decontextualizing her subjects, composing, and transforming the original meaning of the images creating film scripts characterized by topics and titles: “Dystopia”, “Utopia”, “Creation”, and “Stalker”.
Furthermore, the artist suggests the story to its user, wanting to provide almost an aid to our interpretation. In fact, each work is matched by a word becoming the incipit of the narration: “Mass Media”, “Lobotomy”, “Maternity”, “Stereotype”.
I invite you to “nurture the unexpected” by immersing yourself in the fantastic and disturbing worlds represented by the images that this young author has created for the exhibition “Art is the weapon”. Francesca Rossi talks about us, about what surrounds us, of conscious and unconscious, mental manipulation, superstructural conditioning and technologies trying to give us visual and emotional tools to have the weapons to (re)know and defend ourselves.
Written by Christine Enrile
SURREAL UNIVERSES: BETWEEN UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA
Characterized by a biting and irreverent irony, Francesca Rossi’s digital collages are immediately striking for their disturbing beauty and retro aesthetics. The universes created by the artist urge the viewer to reflect on her existence with all the fears that characterize the contemporary world.
Rossi gives life to worlds that don’t exist yet, or maybe yes, because if at first reading these works seem to bring us into dystopias or utopian visions, with a more accurate analysis, we understand that her universes are defined by stereotypes, social constraints, denied freedoms, mental manipulation and many other demons of our society.
The human figure, often unaware of its tragic destiny and lost in everyday contradictions, is key to the artist’s works. In all the four series on show, the protagonists of the scene have to deal with extreme and exaggerated situations; taken aback by their controversial provocations, we nonetheless feel these stories curiously familiar.
In the “Dystopia” series the characters float in suspended atmospheres, a few elements outline a surreal situation where the white space does not give us a feeling of lack but enhances the figures and emphasizes the restlessness of the scene. Giant eyes, typical of surrealist imagery, combine with robotic elements, cages and solitary limbs that loom over figures that appear cheerful and naively happy.
Through images that seem to be set between the past and the future, the artist actually drags us in front of the dramas of the present, in some cases mingled by elements that give us a shred of hope, in others dramatically nihilistic as in the work “ Life” in which a couple happily dances on top of a World War II missile that could explode at any time, due to a lit cigarette held up by a hand coming out of a black hole.
Among the most evocative and intimidating images we must necessarily mention “Maternity” in which the female figure is transfigured and represented as a gigantic spider that cages and at the same time protects a child. Lying down and enchanted by the sting of the hybrid, the child does not seem to notice his condition of prisoner. The emblematic bronze sculpture “Maman” by Louise Bourgeois, a tribute to motherhood and the female world, became the protagonist, however, showing us the contradiction and duplicity of human actions.
The idea of denied freedom is revealed once again in the work “Super-io“in which a hand grips the hair of a young woman, guiding her, or rather limiting her, in the choices she will have to face throughout her life. This hand, suspended above the figure, almost as if it were a divine presence, is often present in Rossi’s works and seems to guide us so we can’t make mistakes or suffer, or more likely tries to dominate us, depriving us of the opportunity to choose.
The artist creates an acute critique of society and the addiction of the masses to technology but also leads us to reflect on the fears associated with the idea of making an important decision and suffering the consequences for better or for worse.
The “Utopia” series, on the other hand, includes 3 works whose succession tells us the story of a woman who, rocking on Gio Ponti’s super light chair, seems to be resignedly waiting for something or someone, perhaps for the spaceship that stands out against a landscape inhabited by a immense moon under which the Monument Valley and the iconic and mighty square Colosseum coexist. A message of hope instead comes towards us in the central work in which a mother and her son try to stay in touch by communicating through herons, often protagonists of fairy tales but also symbolic animals linked to the legend of the phoenix and the concept of rebirth, balance and determination.
In the last two series “Basic” and “Surrealism”, the artist continues to reveal and highlight themes such as destiny, control, the sense of precariousness towards the future, the discomfort that arises from the awareness of being somehow, not entirely masters of one’s own existence. The protagonists of these latest psychographic narratives have the courage to choose, to face the difficulties to try to conquer their place in the world despite the obstacles that dot everyday life.
In the first series, the artist expresses herself through essential graphics and the use of a few elements through which she manages to condense deep meanings.
In the “Creation” and “Stalker” collages, wide-open eyes with a disturbingly fixed gaze observe the scene giving us the feeling that the protagonist is a prisoner of an already written destiny and in which every action is constantly judged. But the same sense of helplessness is also evident in the second series. Indeed, in the work “Inferno”, a Magrittian Charon shelters from a rain of people who, like expert divers, fall into the water waiting to be classified according to their own infernal circle.
It’s as seductive as destabilizing to be faced with the almost totally black and white worlds created by the artist who, from a very young age, has always seen art as a means for a continuous introspection of the world, it is no coincidence that the phrase ART IS THE WEAPON is dear to her. Art for Francesca Rossi is the bearer of criticism, a means to talk about the present.
The most suitable term to express this type of artistic tension is certainly “Artivism”, which in Italian we would translate as “Artivismo”, two words that seem to have been born to coexist. In the artist’s works, art thus becomes an incredible sounding board to draw attention to contemporary problems and burning issues by involving the viewer thanks to the communicative power of art.
Written by Rebecca Piva
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all images © Copyright 2023 Francesca Rossi
