New works by Franca Marini

introduction catalogue exhibition Reconstrucción en rojo Nuevas Obras Galería Nacional, San Josè, Costa Rica, 2005, p. 54

Franca Marini was born in Siena, in Italy, where she completed her artistic education and training to then move onto New York, where she lived and exhibited her work for over ten years. Marini is the author of a complex language of purified forms which reveal an acute power of transformation, that goes from the series of The rebel angels to the introspective landscapes followed by the Invisible movement series and to end up with another called Emergence. This artistic journey characterized by a change of techniques and themes finally takes Franca Marini to the world of abstract condensations where she expresses herself with the use of large paper collages.

In a confident and constant artistic journey, the artist continues transforming her work and, what were once spaces full of characters that shed their weight and fall to the ground, the rebel angels, become other spaces peopled by celestial angels, heavy clouds in geometric form, mystic characters that share the space with static horses in horizontal conglomerates.

Today Franca Marini, once again transformed, presents to the public of Costa Rica some new works realized especially for the halls of the Galería Nacional and leaves her world behind to adopt positive and negative pictorial spaces, which in her unconscious may be black or white angels, substituted with new areas of colour or absence of colour.

The eternal struggle between good and evil which imbued her past work, has taken on a new language. These new works, which feature positive and negative spaces of colour, at times transform themselves into full or empty spaces that give a complete equilibrium to her contemporary creations.

Franca Marini’s exhibition in the halls of the Galería Nacional of the Centro Costarricense de Ciencia y Cultura, realized with the participation of the department of Contemporary Art History of the Università degli Studi di Siena, constitutes a significant moment of collaboration between two important public cultural institutions and represents a considerable happening for the Costa Rican art world giving us the opportunity to appreciate meaningful and sober art work characterized by a great formal variety, revealing and reaffirming an optimism for life and a sublime sense of beauty.