Luis Fracchia and Life’s Stage

Fracchia is an intelligent painter who, right from his choice of pose, illumination and vacuous treatment of the background, creates a critical mass of meanings that go beyond what the eye perceives; for example, the subtle definition of a constant, feminine-masculine unity in his images. In addition to this, there is, in the semantics of the bodies, a series of objects that serve as points of contrast and similarity with the human presence. As in Christian iconography, the subjects’ aura spreads and is complemented in the presence of the objects.

These external elements, that can generally can be classified as objects of a transitory nature, serve as a key to the reflection on the human essence.

This artist’s paintings become a type of theater that remind us of the American director Robert Wilson, whose theatrical productions are characterized by the creation of empty spaces that incorporate only the presence of some element: painting, sculpture or light. The empty stage, the ubiquitous presence of light, and the fading backgrounds are part of this grammar, which emphasizes the body as a sign and symbol. Wilson and Fracchia do not use the object as a prop but as an essential part of the theater metaphor or allegory.

In Luis Fracchia’s paintings, for example in Anna’s Nap (2002), the female characters are engrossed in reflection, unaware that they are being observed. They emanate a charisma that seduces the observer’s thinking and draws him into the model-character’s thoughts and feelings, which can be intuited through body language. The perception that the subjects do not feel watched would lead one to believe that their attitude is more a histrionic one, since their gestures take on a rhetorical value, descriptive of their inner world. In this type of painting, Fracchia uses synecdoche – the meaning of the whole being expressed by a part – as the doorway to an extended perception of being.

Whether dealing with closed or open figures, the compositional direction leads the observer’s eye towards certain points of tension, to what Roland Barthes, in his analysis of photography, calls the image’s punctum, that visual element where the meaning is concentrated that gives life to the composition and is the point of departure for the construction of the aura of the image, something that becomes evident in paintings such as Circular Female Nude (2001-2002). In full command and maturity of his painter’s craft and his talent for the staging of the body, Fracchia makes forays now into a different strategy, that of transferring the meaning of the subject to the object, thus creating an association of forms that are a transposition of complex feelings (see triptych Spinning Strands, 2002).

In Divided Geography (2003), the grainy wood reflects the complexity of being, the wrinkled texture of the stone describes the folds that envelop an inner world united by experiences that leave their mark. Fracchia describes the totality of the experience with direct representations, leaving the anecdotal aside in order to focus on whatever leaves an indelible mark on being.

In his more recent works, Fracchia follows the denotative principle that “less is more”. Through the sharpness with which he paints his bodies, and the faithfulness of his surfaces, he awakens a series of complex connotations in the observer. This is the case for paintings such as True Sky (2004) and False Sky (2004). The pillow becomes sky, the symbol of masculine religions, or is transformed into land from which plants emerge, referring to the symbolic pair, earth and woman. This simple resource of disrupting the realistic morphology of as symbolic an object as the pillow or stone fortifies the description of nature by turning it, in the picture, into a type of miracle reminiscent of transubstantiations (of water into wine, and of stone into bread), and provides us with a symbolism that is in keeping with our present context, by which means it succeeds in changing the painting’s contemplative view into an active speculation on the dreamlike and fantastic. After all, Fracchia’s painting is related to tradition and the present by becoming a forum in which its very presence points to a staging of myths and rites in which we all participate. It makes us realize that reality is in principle a proscenium on which we all act out the scenes of our life and history which, when seen in his paintings, are as familiar to us as they are enigmatic.

Jose Manuel Springer

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