Hallucination of Reality in Luis Fracchia's paintings
Augusto Roa Bastos
There
is an excellent way to discover if a work of art, even those that seem
to be drawn with a meticulous, photographic, mathematical faithfulness
to the real models, possess their own mysterious, furious, sensitive,
internal reality. This way - this perception - consists in feeling, in
verifying that the forms copied resist visual translation of the external
appearance of reality. Something completely unprecedented that annuls
and erases the identity of the original by having absorbed it through
osmosis. This is what happens in Luis Fracchia's pictorial world. His
figuration is a paradigm of this resistance to translation, to literal
iconographic representation. Pushed to its extreme tension of model faithfulness,
it produces the dialectic jump to the overly real or hyper-real, in any
event to a new ontological nature of the real. Hence, the inanity of classifications.
In most of Luis Fracchia's works, what might impress us at first sight
as the powerful, exclusive pulse of reality is nothing else but the psychic,
creative, integrative, static energy of someone who looks through the
palpitating matter of reality, with a visionary perception, to see the
other side of things, to register in his paintings the mutations of his
own states of mind, the reception of the light from a star in the place
where it has always shone, but where nobody saw it before, according to
Franz Kafka's definition of the total artist.
Somewhere in Luis' paintings, he does not know where, there is a dark
aura that at the same time separates and unites different visions. The
human body, as the untouched temple of being, the presence and revelation
of the most intimate and secret details of objects. The hard, pure object.
The infinite prolongation of a line, of a volume. Touched by a primordial,
almost genesic, emotion, we witness the slow appearance of these luminous,
sensitive, tender, and at the same time implacably rough forms, on the
horizon of the painting; we see them come closer until they blend in the
visual explosion of likeness, in the indescribable mystery of identification.
Out of this visible, but penetrating, fusion arises another reality, the
limpid, clear image, that triumph of artistic creation, a mixture of faith,
belief, negation, together with all that this implies of suffering, euphoria,
intoxication, containment of the implacable furies of life, surrounded,
besieged from without by a Dionisian joy of living. Luis Fracchia's work
offers us the essence of the universal in the arch extending from the
detail of a human foot, transformed by art into the pinnacle of being,
to the pendulum formed by a cob of corn swinging above a cliff.