Angelo Franco
-Jules Bekker
Angelo Franco was born in 1950 in the city of Guayaquil, Ecuador and at the age of nineteen came to the United States. From 1973 to 1974 he studied painting and drawing at the City University of New York, Queens College followed by an additional year studying at the Portland Fine Art School in Portland, Maine. In 1976 Franco was awarded a full merit scholarship and an additional financial stipend at the Arts Students League in New York where he studied painting. Since then he has continued to build on this accomplishment. Franco's work is featured in the permanent collection of the Art Students League and he has had numerous exhibitions. He has traveled extensively throughout the United States and lived in several cities. Today, he resides with his wife and two children in the scenic mid-Hudson Valley.
Franco is passionate about painting. Over the years he has experimented with different media and subject matter although his primary focus remains landscape and still life, in
particular, bountiful and verdant floral arrangements. Today, Franco paints in oil on canvas with a technique that is as intuitive and distinctive as it is accomplished. He uses tightly woven marks and prismatic color to build up the surface and describe subject.
In Franco's paintings the boundaries between subject, surface and form dissolve as his layered application of prismatic dots, points, and discs-within-discs create an optical playground in which the juxtapositions of color against color work to describe form and subject on the one hand and to explore color theory on the other. The abstract surface that results from these explorations is lively, rich and intellectually satisfying.
Painting as a two dimensional art form has historically relied on color, tone and perspective to represent what the artist sees. Contemporary painters with the benefit of hindsight and the accumulative learning of history to draw from have been able to free themselves of many of the formal constraints of the past. Today, more than ever before, artists are able to respond to their unique internal impulses to create, use or discard what has come before.
It was in the early 19th century that "Color Theory" as we know it today, began to influence the arts. Two important founding documents, the "Theory of Colors" published in 1807 by Johan Wolfgang von Goethe, a German poet and bureaucrat, and "The Law of Simultaneous Color Contrast" by Michel-Eugène Chevreul a French industrial chemist, played an enormous part in developing artistic understanding of the structure and behavior of color. Chevreul, in particular, studied the perceived interaction of colors juxtaposed against each other in different combinations.
The artists George Seurat (1859-91) and Paul Signac (1863 - 1935) were devotees of Chevruel's findings and embraced his theories in their own explorations of color and light. Pointillism, as espoused by Seurat was a highly formalized and scientifically arranged series of color responses in which the formal elements of painting; composition, pictorial space and the illusion of perspective were built not by using the traditionally accepted forms of tone and line, but by using the interrelationship of meticulously analyzed color as the structural basis. Pure, unblended points of color were used to build form, light and depth. Viewed close up, the pointillist's canvasses seethe with a mass of vibrating color, but from a distance, these colors blend together allowing form and subject to emerge from the surface as if by magic.
To the casual observer there may seem to be a link between Angelo Franco's paintings and the concerns of pointillism. Franco has indeed embraced some aspects of color theory but he applies them loosely and playfully. In a more contemporary twist he also takes inspiration from the computer age, specifically digitization. When an image on a computer screen is enlarged it becomes increasingly pixilated, broken up and flattened. Form disappears and is replaced by pattern and color. The pointillists instinctively knew this, but since the representational image was still central to their times, surface abstraction remained subservient to subject matter. Franco's abandonment of these constraints allows him to use color as pattern and to loosely describe rather than define the subject-definition is further subjugated by a lively surface texture and tonal shading, traditionally the means by which subject takes shape, is altogether discarded by the artist. Color becomes king - it bounces and shimmies warm against cool, creating a dynamic interplay of surface, color and subject.
- January 2007
