On the eastern Sicilian coast, at La Verde La Malfa Foundation – specifically in San Giovanni La Punta (CT) – contemporary art is presented as a medium to explore the most intimate and spiritual dimension of existence. Indeed, on the occasion of its XVII anniversary, the exhibition “Del Vedere e del Sentire” (Of Seeing and Feeling) by Franco Marrocco was inaugurated, open until December 30, 2025. The exhibition project, promoted and conceived by the Foundation’s president Alfredo La Malfa, Dario Cunsolo and the curator Giorgio Agnisola, is sponsored by the municipality of the Etna town. The exhibition consists of an installation of eighteen medium and large-scale pictorial works from which emerges a chromatic symmetry in a search for the infinitesimal in a macroscopic key.
Franco Marrocco, “La grande palpebra“, 2009, mixed media on canvas, cm 180 x 450. Courtesy La Verde La Malfa Foundation
Franco Marrocco, born in 1956, professor of Painting and director of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, presents a pictorial language with an intense, sparkling and fluid chromatic rhythm. Since the 1970s, his pictorial research has been characterized by expressionistic notes that led him to create his personal vision of matter, light and color. Moreover, as an acute investigator of the human condition, he leaves to color its spiritual and symbolic meaning and to matter its most ascetic vision. However, in his chromatic choice, Marrocco reveals his theory of the senses: an empathy of feeling and seeing that translates into perceptions, entrusted to warm and intense colors. For Marrocco, painting is «a radically human act, it is an exercise of resistance to nothingness. The nothingness of meaning, the nothingness of form, the nothingness of language». For Alfredo La Malfa, instead, these works are «a spiritual journey among the most lucid in the current Italian panorama concerning art that can be ascribed to the search for the sacred».
Franco Marrocco, “Ascesa”, 2012, mixed media on canvas, cm 240 x 180; “Alito e Costato”, 2010-11, mixed media on canvas, cm 150 x 90. Courtesy La Verde La Malfa Foundation
It is clear, without any doubt, how much the artist has inherited the lesson from the masters of American avant-garde, such as Rothko, to create large-scale works. However, Marrocco’s are often two or three canvases, made with mixed technique and joined together, for his personal theory of extended and almost zoomed color. This painting should be understood as a magnifying glass that condenses what cannot be seen with the naked eye, with color filling the canvases up to the lateral depths, beyond the margins. These are warm hues in a gradual sequence of tones, especially red, that expand until they intensify their texture into dark colors like black. Already from the title, this exhibition intends to reaccustom the public to an almost meditative painting that questions the instants of existence and does so in a minimal way, detaching itself from the exponential noise of inputs: images and words to which one is always exposed with the empire of technology. A contemplative painting that becomes space, in the here and now: a fragile sign and testimony of a different way of feeling and seeing, perceiving and imagining.
Franco Marrocco, “Dialogo”, 2009, mixed media on canvas, cm 240 x 180; “Il bacio”, 2010, mixed media on canvas, cm 150 x 90. Courtesy La Verde La Malfa Foundation
The pictorial language of these works fits perfectly with the choices of the La Verde La Malfa Foundation whose intent is always to remember the imaginative and artistic commitment of Elena La Verde, as Alfredo La Malfa emphasized. While curator Giorgio Agnisola stated how these works should be read from a distance and «seem made to integrate space, to configure it in perspective, open it to clues of furtherness and transfiguration of seeing and feeling». Ultimately, this is an exhibition that wants to bring to the fore the meditative and contemplative aspect, in a world shaped by rapidity, with abstract forms that do not want to deceive, but to give concrete testimony of the imperceptible on which the entire matter of planet earth is shaped.
Info:
Franco Marrocco. Del Vedere e del Sentire
curated by Giorgio Agnisola
28/09/2025 – 30/12/2025
Fondazione La Verde La Malfa
Parco dell’Arte, San Giovanni La Punta (CT)
Via Sottotenente Pietro Nicolosi, 29 – 95037
www.fondazionelaverdelamalfa.com
Through art she feels the need to get closer to nature, deciding to create an artistic residence on Etna as a “refuge for contemporary art” for artists and scholars. Thus was born Nake artistic residence. She won the Responsible Etna Award 2015. In 2017, she was invited to the Sala Zuccari, Senate of the Republic, as an art critic. She writes for Italian and foreign artists. Curator of the first Museum of Contemporary Art of Etna and of the “Contemporary Etna” project.
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