Franco Fontana

Franco Fontana (Modena 1933) is a pioneer of colour photography who started his artistic research in the 60’s – a decade before colour photography began to be accepted as a creative medium – and has devoted his entire career to developing his own unique visual language.

Electing as subjects all scapes – landscapes, waterscapes, urbanscapes – Fontana extracts from them the essential information in a process of increasing abstraction, creating fields of colours that have often been compared to those of abstract expressionists such as Rothko and Newman.

“Landscapes that on first glance appear to be geometric triangles of subtle coloration, on closer inspection reveal these shapes as demarcating fields of wheat, flowers, and up-turned soil, lending his images a dimension beyond the purely aesthetic” (Naomi Rosenblum).

Fontana has often described his process of compressing an image taken from 3-dimensional reality into the a bi-dimensional plane as an act of violence that forces the viewer to recognise each image not as a mirror of reality but as an autonomous entity, a self-contained picture.