Have a look at Francesco Caraccio’s works on paper: a triumph of colours, a movement of elusive shapes that link up sensitivity and the mind, stimulate and open speculation over many spaces, history of the creativity, ethics and aesthetics, memory and imagination, psychology and psychoanalysis. As Kandinsky would hint: “The unusual shape hides what there is behind it: that is what it like for most men”; to that we can add what Amiel’s words were: any landscape is a state of the soul and one who reads from one of the other wonders at the simile in each detail. Complete landscapes of the being, not of the showing or representing, if what Mondrian remarked was true: “The glory of the contemporary painting is its detachment from the need of the literal figuration”. Caraccio’s landscapes involve and conjugate man and nature.
A dimension thankful to the wind which blows fantastic seeds, colours of the unconscious, heraldic symbols that prefer circular concentration of the nucleus, of the eyes, the moon. Caraccio, on reconciling his impulses and meditation, composes synoptical images of subtle charm which gather evidences of life, traces of dreams, announcement of other earthly gardens, thoughts and feelings… silence.
One recognises images happy in themselves, deceiving in their parent instinctuality. From the laboratory of abstract art (from which Caraccio does not move away, as if in a archipelago of the informal), there stems another enlightening voice: Arp’s: “Man yields art like a tree yields a fruit or like a baby in a mother’s womb”.
Caraccio artistic birth and growth have been developed through correct and coherent experiments. Art, as well as nature, follows its own rhythm. It is rather rare to track down, as in Caraccio’s life, a steady and unexhausted research (even when inside a period of uncontrollable experimentalism, of games and risks). With eyes wide open, Caraccio has not bestowed great concern on lessons or “isms”. He has most signed manifestos. The only indication of suggestibility is his friendship with Belgian painter Corneille, with whom he held an exhibition in Rome in 1983.
In the “Cobra”, Corneille is the mildest with symbolistic suggestions. Being a friend of Corneille’s Caraccio may have developed a more remarkable constituent syntax, which becomes more untraditional, from the countenances to simulacra, from the transparence to the chromatic rising; to sum up the empire of the filtered, personalised colours.
In the creative process, the use of paper, carefully chosen, tasted, experimented on its more secret resources is very peculiar. The paper on which Caraccio lays his soul is not only an ordinary surface, a pre-existing element, but an essential value which is sublimated in the author’s interventions, in a symbiosis among the signs, colours, inks, acrylics and the use of water.
A chromatic organism stems from the splendid and assiduous contamination; the contagion of the elements admitted in the artistic invention. A dawn-like light is spread on the surface. One rejoices at the visual harmony, shapes, colours, the elements, always refined, without compromising the ornamentation with a lyric tension which has myths, rhythms that never fall.
CRITICISM
Alberico Sala
Remo Brindisi
(…) a young artist like Caraccio has the right to be a learned and aware man with regards to his artistic future. I think the archeological era of modern art has come to an end, at least for the artists themselves, hesitations and historical delays belonging only to scholars and thinkers, influenced by their nature, that of not having the gift of intuition. I wish François Caraccio freedom in life and in judgement, so I don’t think this brief piece of writing on my behalf should be considered an art criticism, more simply a welcoming to the promise land of painting, which is a lot already.
Paolo Levi
Time
I belong to a generation born between two wars, therefore post-romantic and fideist, that doesn’t fear the use of neglected terms such as emotion, transcendence and immanence.
These are the main contradictory aspects that make Francesco Caraccio’s paintings so interesting and unusual in the contemporary Italian artistic scene.
We’re talking about an artist whose paintings belong to a certain artistic elite, that can be well described by Ortega’s and Gasset’s words on the “Dehumanization of art”: “Modern art is such that the best can know each other and recognize each other among the grey mass and discover their mission, which consists in being few and struggling against many”.
Caraccio is a painter of portraits, of faces that I dare define human landscapes, like disturbing figurative warnings. As we know, he does not belong to a group or to a structured movement. His tangible autographed “posters” witness the end of man’s integrity, or even better, of his soul. Fully understanding our time is not in fact an easy task for a present-day intellectual, whether contemporary painter or writer.
The present era cannot be easily harnessed in a scheme. There are no magic formulas that can clarify the crisis of humankind, now a case lacking warmth and sensations, solely capable of searching for false appearances of life, often without any satisfaction.
Place
I have the feeling that Francesco Caraccio’s contemporary man is a cromatic shadow of himself - a memory, a sign of something that could have “begun” but never did. Still figures that can perceive “what could have been” from their existential distance.
Therefore, with a sharp dry accent, Caraccio defines the boundaries of a figurative world floating in silence, above the frontier of nothing. Can we call them characters? If we want to, yes. They are not heroes however, they do not scream for hate. Our time cannot be called promethean.
These shadows are certainly not martyrs excluded from eternal pardon. Caraccio’s basic theme doesn’t allow for any certainty. One of the messages that we water diviners attempt to capture in these “internally unsolved” portraits is a (utopian) matter of human ecology: an unsettling stage of faces without mouths, without eyes, just color-signs, blind figures belonging to a moral aristocracy of the past.
Maybe they are wretched people born only with heads, without bodies. In fact, Caraccio shapes them without a neck, the natural symbol-sign of congiunction. The artistic life of this painter cannot and should not be confused with that of his fellow artists, which work in between the ephemeral and the citationist. As we know, we live in a time in which trends come and go and in which we are, most of all, bombarded by news, encounters, false clashes. Caraccio reads into all of this, with dismay, in an attempt to denounce the violence inflicted upon existence, through the essential with a metaphysical touch, without playing games with hoards of symbols. The only true symbol, for Caraccio, is Man.
Transformation
To understand as fully as possibile Caraccio’s person, not only his contents but his artistic value too, we must focus upon his creative trademark.
His research dates back to history’s Expressionism, mostly to those artists that were part of the Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) experience.
Caraccio, an essential and rigorous painter, plays with slow backgrounds and cromatic overlaps that break, with restrained violence, the canvas’s evenness. His language uses colour-signs to punctuate, with alive and violent rhythms. All of which build a stylistic order, which give way to slices that play ambiguously with bearly perceivable lights. The use of certain colours is an essential choice for Caraccio.
His “masks” cannot in fact be conceived without reds, blues, violets.
Mysteriously ritualist contemporary masks.
Serena D'Arbela
Francesco Caraccio´s expressive vein, enriched by the plastic and graphic experience, bears an original chromatic poetry of a particular and fantastic tension, enabling him to mould the image creating it out of colors. This is noticed observing the great bodies that stem from unexpected points in the canvas, avoiding the predictable directions of the mind. The presence of each character is imposed on the observer as a sudden appearance, dragging him in the whereabouts of the dreams and memories. It is through such unexpected moves, temporary replacements, the frequent focus on a specific part of the paintings that a mysterious physiognomy of ideal shadows is obtained. While looking at each, even when seeming to be trying to flee the canvas, they set the rules of an exiting game. Their irreplaceable time is revealed to the eyes. They invite us to follow them through their dynamic and constituent route, to travel through the floating rhythms of the imaginary, through the restlessness of the thought. The emerging colors, sometimes sweet, sometimes violent, the sea greens, the solar yellows, the red lights as well as the unstable balance of the many sudden presences and absences introduce the sequences of an unreal and oneiric order, the remembrances and memories of own experiences.
The images derive from a chromatic invention full of expressionist echoes, leading to a redissolution in the color if the canvas did not engulf it in a live trial. Caraccio´s ghost taken from the universe of the everyday life and the sensations of the existence, represent their world and their way of being, reflect their feelings, messages, reveal their recognition, as well as reality and imagination find in the colouristic intuition of this painter, also sculptor and graphic designer, their ideal filter.
Martina Corgnati
The image takes an unexpected shape. At first it is a simple gesture, a sketch in motion. Almost an instintive trace, an emotion that suddenly guides the hand, the eye, the desire, the attention towards the paper, towards a white surface; empty, inviting. I said: in motion.
There is no time for control, for thoughts. There is a colour, for example, then another, with impulsive strokes, almost coarse. The surface reacts, responds.
A shadow, for example, condenses around the brush’s humid trace. Then again, all over, splashes, splatters, blots, hints and trails of fallen drops, lost in whiteness.
Wassily Kandinsky in Murnau comes to mind, during that fateful night when all of a sudden one of his paintings came to him, although unrecognizable, because upside down. An image with its own life, without a precise meaning, born from the contact with an internal need, with something so deep and real that even the artist ignores, but the painting knows.
Once again I insist: Kandinsky in that extraordinary season between 1910 and 1914 when his insane
method meant composing without a preliminary project, through the free addition of parts, of tone inspirations, separating the mass from the motion, the hand’s movement that traces and the river of colour which overflows in places where, always, one can feel emptiness, breath.
I am talking about some of Francesco Caraccio’s papers, direct descendants of the lyrical Expressionism’s prototypes, invented by Kandinsky in those magical years. Papers that repeat themselves, like a periodic appointment, throughout the artist’s path, a constant need that constellates his work. Calling them “notes” would be inappropriate, not only for the often imposing size, also because of the finished aspect of these pieces. The use of paper must not mislead us: for Caraccio, in fact, it is as important as canvass, having its own peculiar aspects, its versatility and its willingness.
Not even the quickness of their creation is a limit, but a language with its own rules, his syntax. Francesco Caraccio makes use of everything that his imagination suggests him, he experiments freely, a line, a spiral, a swirl, a curve. Typical elements of the informal, but calling these adventures of soul informal would be, to say the least, hasty, if not, misleading. The artist doesn’t allow for definitions of kind nor style. His intentions are broader, his journey completely different. In fact, from these large papers pressured by colour, from these interventions full of momentum, continuous and quick, to the search for something that remains undefined, bit by bit a meaning finds its way, paper after paper.
A different meaning each time, which seems to emerge, as if from its own thickness, from the imagès light texture, complicated by numerous other marks, and by many other possibilities: maybe an eye, the straight line of a nose, the basic volume of a face. Francesco Caraccio is in fact searching for this essential display, that must be understood through the naturalness and the spontaneity of an event.
Considering this, the label of informal becomes limited, as well as surpassed. There is certainly a representation, or better still, an interest for the meaning of these shapes, that come alive paper after paper, work after work, only to fall back again in the dense and mellow shaded colour, a delicate colour, full of details, as in a post-impressionist landscape. However, something is still in ambush, as if waiting to emerge at the right time, to rise and exist. Something impending, like Borges’s beast, the kind that one imagines at the end of a sunset. It is man, the human space.
After a quick glance at these lines, one can come to the conclusion that Francesco Caraccio is an abstract painter, that at one point chose to shift to figurative arts and to portray the human figure. Or (one thing does not exclude the other) that his is an artwork in italics, undisciplined, which makes it difficult to identify a contour or a (tidy) precise symbolic organization.
In reality it is not like that at all, rather the opposite: Caraccio, as a painter, was born upright, careful and hypercrital towards himself. If we must find him a home, looking back a few years at his fascinating “Disperazione” (Despair), a thick almost monochrome structure, one might be tempted to consider him part of a certain Essential Realism, except for the loaded wax-like colour, a turgid skilful colour: almost a novel in itself, related in some way to Schifano’s early backgrounds (the genius of monochrome). Therefore, back then Francesco Caraccio was already painting figures, characters. His ability in portrait painting is obvious. Tiziano (they say) once affirmed: “give me cow dung and I will make you the most beautiful nude you could possibly imagine…as long as you allow me to choose the other colours”. In a similar manner, Caraccio uses, in this case, a blue leaden grey for the face and the hands which hold the hat, a slightly lighter grey on the water-like forehead, like a puddle, and a darker shade in the eyes’ dark circles, along the neckline.
And yet this face is alive, full of tenderness, at the same time intangible because of the infinite distance of its look, that imposes itself over a straight line through an abstract space. It is a unique emotionally precise portrait, realist, but already expressionist in its nature: in the end, we must in fact search for Francesco’s affinities and his fellow artists within the ample culture of the 1900’s. However, nothing too wild, nor intemperate, rather more a pondering and meditative figurative search, like that which grew between Monaco and northern Germany during the first two decades of the 1900’s. We already mentioned Kandinsky, but we should now focus on Nolde, for example, or on the almost unknown Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), quiet lead role of the artistic Worpswede colony in Schlewig-Holstein, around the year 1900; author of very original but simple paintings, characterized by a solidity and an almost monumental fullness, particulary surprising with regards to humble everyday subjects, among which children’s faces stand out, faces without any descriprion or narrative. And then, above all, Jawlensky, an almost obsessive inventor of faces shut into an abysmal, almost mystical, distance, created simply through a few lines draw across an empty space: a horizontal one for the eyes, a vertical one for the nose, faces like crosses, almost symbols, paradoxically capable of defining and establishing a physiognomy from nothing, through the use of essential and extremely limited means and words (if they can be called such).
Like Jawlensky, Caraccio too found in the human face everything he needed. But then he had to make an effort, a long and tiresome exercise in order to give up, forever, all forms of anectotage, to free himself from all the superfluous, to the point of giving up his technical skills, his ability and his talent as a portrait painter. At this point it became possible for him to dig without limits into the endless world of human expressions, constantly finding new and different variations, sometimes portrayed through two simple pencil marks among ample watercolour backgrounds, or through a raging circle over a series of strong sharp vertical lines, that suddenly plunge into the edge of the nasal cavity. A bare and brief language, which does not however give up its tenacious expressive incisiveness.
There is, in fact, something legendary in these heads that dominate the paper or the canvass’s empty space, not only when the strokes thicken in a more precise manner, but also when they are reduced to a sort of haiku, a japanese cry released in an empty space. This is the case of Sintesi (Synthesis), from few fulminating strokes to the definition of the essential, through the crumbled affixing of meanings, before any sort of syntactical development. Considering the current artistic scene, all of this appears uniquely strong and original. Francesco Caraccio is undoubtedly an artist who has walked a personal path, independently from all diktats and recent cultural and visual expectations, free from the latest trends and from mediatic influences. It is not surprising therefore that his work has received numerous careful acclaims, first abroad (mainly in France, Belgium and northern Europe, where Caraccio lived for a long time), then in Italy. He doesn’t let himself be harnessed in groups or currents created especially to the liking of the art system. The return to painting caught him off guard in a new present position, like it did to others who previously decided to go along their own personal ways. The present day eclecticism confirms his tangible current singularity, typical of those artists who, independently from the language they chose and the eras they belong to, are interested in the eternally recurrent and endless dimension called the “human condition”. Undoubtedly a vast and infinite world, that always awaits, time after time, to be defined through words, through painting itself, with all its changes and irregularities. So, we still have to mention vivacious performance, impulsiveness, insubordination to the polite accademic image. Francesco Caraccio absorbed, without allowing himself to be subdued, the teachings of Transvanguardism, as a new possible soaring flight over the open bounderies of figuration. He welcomed the freedom of intellectual and operational nomadism, as a risky challenge to start over, once again, towards the creation of an image without a past. Sometimes, he lingers over the pleasure of illustrating (in the “Toulouse-Lautrec” sense, intended as the mundane quality of strickly adhering to the story of an instant, of a life). Caraccio, a relentless illustrator, capable of summarizing everything in a few gestures: a mood, a personality, the satisfaction of a certain relationship (I’m thinking of Temptation).
At times it is the opposite: he pushes himself once again towards an obsolete frontal style, sculpting a large canvass in a way that can be called Assyrian or Sumerian, creating a flat face with no expression, defined only by the shadows and lights of an insisting and sharp, almost stubborn, outline.
Whether he represents ancient gods with indecipherable smiles, through the meticulousness of a miniaturist or, better still, of an ebony worker (I in fact predict that Francesco Caraccio will experiment plastic art or sculpture in the future), whether he quickly intervenes to close the circle of a possible story, whether he tests his complete freedom in the empty canvass, careless even of the image – the artist remains distintive, always himself in his temporary control of the painting’s situation, control which bounces from canvass to canvass, moment to moment, sensitive to chromatic transparencies, to shades of light, but at the same time, when necessary, capable of dealing with a profound rhyhmical concert of deep sombre tones.
In these images there is a sort of atavic memory, a primal memory, which has to do with a facès essence, with the simple archetypical form upon which a human face is structured, a binary code of black and white, of signs and textures. A form that Caraccio’s paintings are always searching for. This is the strength that defines his long journey, his ancient loyalty to all that is universal, all that in his hands transforms itself into the door to the present date and to the painting’s genuineness: a door to which, however, very few have the key.