Since ancient times, nature has represented a fundamental inspiration source for artists, expressed in an infinite number of formal, allegorical and technical variations depending on the era and civilization. Beyond the canonical genre of landscape, centered on a realistic or expressive representation of the visible, the light, color and texture of natural elements have offered (and continue to offer) artists inexhaustible ideas for experimenting with processes and building languages.
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi, “La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura”, installation view, photo credits Cristina Bagnara, courtesy degli artisti
Regardless of any symbolic or conceptual intention more closely tied to specific cultural contexts, the natural matrix in art still proves to be extremely vital today in inducing artists to create new worlds, in a constant crossing of aesthetic, speculative, sensorial and psychological dimensions. These individual lines of research, united by the intent to arrive at the essence of a natural substance understood as a material and chromatic paste generating images and forms, arise from a sensitive observation of natural data, but also from an ancestral desire to understand and interpret the forces underlying the perpetual regeneration of life. This orientation, more than from a programmatic declaration of pre-established poetic intentions, appears to be animated by a spontaneous and sometimes unconscious aspiration to harmony between macro and micro cosmos, between totality and detail, between the individual and the ordered physical universe. According to this approach, therefore, the work is never a definitive landing that crystallizes a content or a limited project, but is the crucible where this osmosis occurs, bringing to light a changing catalogue of imprints that reveal the transformations of a process that is ideally always in progress, open to the unexpected events of the material. The research of Fiorenza Pancino, ceramist, and Franco Tosi, painter, belong to this area, so they are here called into an unprecedented dialogue that brings together a selection of works created at various moments of their career, demonstrating how this artistic line continues to be significant and pregnant with events.
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi, “La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura”, installation view, photo credits Cristina Bagnara, courtesy degli artisti
Fiorenza Pancino’s work is based on the convergence between a refined artisanal wisdom, heir to a thousand-year-old tradition, and pure formal and coloristic experimentation, carried out through a very personal expressive vocabulary made of symbols, gestures, obsessions and impulsive tactile incarnations of her most intimate emotional experiences. The artist’s work could be defined as a sort of “imperfect humanism”, in which the human being (always the protagonist even in the most abstract compositions) is no longer the center and measure, but vulnerable matter, of which the fire concretizes the temporary structural balances by putting them in relation to what happens in the natural sphere, which is also referred to by the lush patinas that her works are covered with during firing. In her sculptural manipulations, Pancino uses the primordial archetypes of clay modeling, such as the cylinder, the disk, the tube or the bowl, which are transformed by her emotionally calibrated gestures into autonomous plastic organisms equipped with spikes, ripples, dents, chasms, swellings and tentacles reaching out to conquer the surrounding space. It is as if the matter, through her intervention, were awakened in its internal turmoil and became sentient to become an existential reverberation of a process of consciousness and liberation that in its outcomes goes beyond the autobiographical circumstance from which each work draws its urgency to offer itself with delicate vulnerability to collective participation.
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi, “La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura”, installation view, photo credits Cristina Bagnara, courtesy degli artisti
It is central to the artist’s poetics the concept of emptiness, as revealed by the holes that appear, in more or less hidden positions, in each sculpture to make synchronically perceptible both the lack around which each of them develops, and its overcoming, through introspective meditation that leads to the elaboration of their tangible form. Equally important is the chromatic aspect of the sculptures, on the one hand obtained through the rigorous technical control of the firing phases of the enamels and established starting from a recurring symbolic apparatus that associates each shade with a very precise idea, on the other hand a joyful externalization of the freedom to sensorially enjoy the properties of the materials and therefore to let the color drip, smear, clump and shine following the trends of the sculptural surface. Her creatures, therefore, are hybrid entities generated by the repetition of a gesture that is both exploratory and healing, through which the artist’s inner can dissolve and recompose themselves as external presences, now objects of wonder thanks to their new form.
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi, “La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura”, installation view, photo credits Cristina Bagnara, courtesy degli artisti
If the works of Fiorenza Pancino can be assimilated to the particular manifestations of a nature-body that tries to identify itself in order to establish an empathetic and equal relationship with the human component from which they ultimately derive, in the paintings of Franco Tosi the natural factor, to the same founding extent, is present in a completely different sense. The painter’s works, in fact, are large canvases of a monochrome tone at first sight that impose themselves in space as environmental installations, in which the silent events that we gradually discover emerging from the pictorial surface give us the impression of being on the precipice of a boundless and uncontrollable panorama. In these visions there are no recognizable elements, and not even units of measurement are suggested to relate what we are looking at to a plausible hypothesis, even if mysteriously we sense that, whether they are aerial panoramas or organic tissues observed under a microscope (both plausible hypotheses, it is up to us to decide), we are faced with something consubstantial with our experience of the world and of ourselves. In fact, the paintings that Tosi rightly defines as “mental landscapes” place our point of view in a hidden gap between our private infinity, which is both mental and biological, and the infinity of creation, which through them becomes available to be explored both in a cosmic and a lenticular sense.
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi, “La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura”, installation view, photo credits Cristina Bagnara, courtesy degli artisti
At the root of this inexplicable transdimensional affinity there is the natural matrix, which in Tosi’s case is inscribed in the DNA of painting. In his creative process, actually, the traditional oil technique is hybridized with the introduction of refined materials of vegetal origin, such as pine resin from the Urals, the dry leaves of the red maples of Central Park crushed until they become a pigment, the golden secretion of a particular Thai beetle used in cabinetmaking and other workshop secrets that link his practice to the technical treatises on painting in vogue between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His approach, on the other hand, is entirely contemporary, starting from a void (this time mental) necessary to listen to the internal resonance of the color he has in mind, the only predefined element of the work in addition to the measurements, to then proceed with a hand-to-hand fight with the canvas spread out on the ground in which the first layers of material are instinctively deposited, even using unconventional tools such as the hands or a construction site spatula.
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi, “La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura”, installation view, photo credits Cristina Bagnara, courtesy degli artisti
The next phase after this liberating externalization of the suggestions triggered by the sensorial evocation of the initial color is a patient work of identifying the details to be detected, in which the artist emphasizes and supports the reciprocal reactions of the materials he superimposes and mixes, deciding which suggestions offered by their sometimes unpredictable collisions to include in the epidermal narration of the work. And it is precisely this inextricable mixture between the artist’s actions and the behaviors of a material that is alive and subject to perpetual change that allows his painting to delve into the realm of the imperceptible to return it as an integrated atmosphere in which interior, exterior, physical laws and emotions take on a single visible form.
Info:
Fiorenza Pancino e Franco Tosi. La sostanza naturale: un percorso emozionale tra scultura e pittura
08/03/2025 – 13/04/2025
Mercato Centro Culturale
Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, 1 – Argenta (FE)
www.comune.argenta.fe.it
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
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