Inner Resonances

Paintings and ceramics by Francesca Secchi

 

by Bruna Condoleo, Art Historian, Journalist, Curator of art exhibitions and catalogues.

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Always an attentive observer of reality, Francesca Secchi operates in a world between reality and the poetic transfiguration of nature. Her work shows chromatic and compositional sensitivity, her intention being the transposition of the infinite and dynamic beauty of nature - today more than ever threatened by human exploitation - into an artistic vision.

During the creative process, Francesca Secchi has consciously detached herself from the mere figurative rendering of reality, by considering the painting as an autonomous entity. The forms featured in her paintings aim to express the whole range of sensations and emotions suggested by the magnificence of Creation and absorbed into our inner-self. References to nature are always her starting point, for a free development of colour and shape.

If the aim of art is to penetrate the secret essence of things, then, as the great Henry Matisse said, colour is able to express this discovery through its mysterious energy. Shape, line and colour are the fundamental terms of Francesca Secchi’s style, which, poised in between abstraction and concreteness, translates emotions - more similar to musical sounds – which then exert a direct pressure on the soul.

In her choice of shapes, she is never casual, continuously reinventing by pure inner need. Painting in this way becomes a world shielded from all the disquietudes and issues of our times. Estranged from ideology and history, her art lives in an Eden-like world, where the vital flux of signs and colours – expertly administered – uplifts the soul and evokes a spiritual freedom otherwise so difficult to reach.

Her paintings are projections of immateriality, and translations of pure spiritual values. The water of seas, rivers and lakes, either calm or whirling, is the natural feature which, for Francesca, is the most inspiring. Water is, in fact, full of symbolic meanings: the primordial element from which life was born, but also a thin border line, a path open to new horizons, all emblematic of freedom and the centre of the soul.

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No strong contrasts of tones, but calibrated harmonies of blues, pinks and yellows, surrounded by whites sprayed with emerald, epitomize her poetic style, aimed at defining what Matisse called “the space of the spirit”.

Remaining faithful to a metaphorical abstraction from reality, the artist creates dynamic surfaces by interlacing and overlapping trails of colour and creating melodic chords of tints, punctuated by incisive marks. There is a constant dialogue between the spontaneous flux of colour, with its psychic evocations, and the intervention of the Artist, who articulates and regulates it, until it becomes a controlled linguistic system.

Her predilection for the tones of blue, connects not only with her love of the sea, but also with a tension towards the absolute and a spiritual research exhibited in the evident musicality of chromatic values. Painting that moves like music; music that becomes painting in the attempt of drawing our pulsating and indistinctive inner energy, which pervades the universe.

What flourishes on the canvas is something formedmostly in her subconscious: images taken more from the oneiric sphere than from the real existence, make it clear that the true reality coincides for Francesca with what is saved from human contamination. In her works of art, whether they are paintings or ceramics, the subtle linear and chromatic congruencies produce secret inner resonances.