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may 17, 2021 - Galleria Poggiali

Galleria Poggiali Pietrasanta | Exhibition by Francesca Banchelli "A THOUSAND DAYS COUNT"


The Galleria Poggiali of #pietrasanta opens the summer exhibition season with a solo show by  Francesca Banchelli (Montevarchi, 1981) curated by #sergiorisaliti (opening Saturday 22 May 2021 from 5.30 p.m.). A Thousand Days Count is the title chosen by the artist to present her paintings and sculptures in the project room in Via Garibaldi 8 and in the atmospheric setting of the former Luigi Tommasi artistic foundry. 

Francesca Banchelli’s career is already marked by major shows in leading venues both in Italy and abroad, including the Museo Pecci in Prato, Villa Romana in Florence, the MACBA in Barcelona and the Tate Modern in London. Her research spans from painting and drawing to sculpture, performance and video. She recently had a show at the Museo Novecento in Florence, taking part in the Duel project in dialogue with a work by Scipione (Gino Bonichi).

Her paintings invite us to reconsider the narrative power of painting. Attracted by an exploration of colour in its magical-expressive guise, we follow a flow of figurative apparitions – men, women, children, birds and wild animals – living in a natural world amidst a luxuriance of plants and water, swept away by a storm, at times dark as in a leaden night sky. Nevertheless, Banchelli’s landscapes are those of the inner depths, sites of the soul that host experiences of the personal and collective subconscious. Current events, history and even everyday life take on an archetypal and surreal resonance. The anecdote, the memory and the objective datum are transfigured in a dreamlike imaginary that includes in its past and future scenes both the remote past and what is to come, the unknown and the foreseen. Dream, prophecy, reminiscence or prefiguration, her poetics permeates and yields up a micro and macrocosmic pictorial language in a dimension that cuts across the chronology of diurnal and nocturnal time. In this way the paintings become rituals in which the deepest and most prophetic knowledge coincides with the light of the colour and the eloquence of the figures. The painting speaks to us, whispers and allows us to fantasise, giving us the chance to reawaken our capacity for projection, to imagine and connect all the knowledge of the subconscious with the real data, the individual soul with the soul of the world. In this sense Banchelli’s paintings are almost performative actions that engage us individually and collectively. And, like all rituals or performances, her pictorial works can function as an experience of transference and catharsis, since they possess a demiurgical nature or power.

In this respect, Banchelli’s paintings do appear to be narrative, but only at a first level of interpretation. They also demand from us greater mental and emotional exploration. After an initial phase of enjoyment of the type of execution – light, swift, intense and rich in nuance – we ask ourselves about the meaning of the various figures and objects in the scene and the connections between them. The story eludes us, but we implicitly intuit it. The painting is still something mental, but it is a thought of the image that springs from the heart, from the imaginary of the innermost. The painting adds something specific, an alterity that is proper to it. It creates worlds and stories that may be finished and that are about to happen, perhaps repeating themselves, different and original. As Francesca  Banchelli herself explains, ‘Painting leads me to explore territories that cannot be reached by other media. Painting explores and fills imaginaries that have been created by working on concepts and thoughts, imaginaries so stable that they become unstable again, become realities ready to open up and be told with implications that would be unthinkable except through the use of painting.’