Reviews (english)
from “Art-mine” (by Joyce Asper, Agora Gallery – Celsea International Fine Arts, New York)
Rooted in the legacy of Italian masters, both of the Renaissance and Modernism, Italian painter Silvio Franzini composes visual symphonies of color on his canvas through transcendent hues and mystically irregular forms. Synthesizing music to painting, Franzini dexterously arranges harmonies of electric primary colors into soothingly serene melodies. The artist’s sensitivity towards the painterly sounds of music is palpable to the viewer, as we visualize the lyrically resonance of colors and shapes. Soft textures characterize his brushwork, allowing the sumptuous qualities of paint to become irresistibly perceptible to the viewers’ eye. As richly spontaneous as his work might seem, Franzini meticulously plans and researches his works, studying carefully the example of the likes of Leonardo da Vinci or Kandinsky. Working from this base, Franzini blends his innate aestheticism in order to articulate a uniquely visual sound. “Since i was a child, listening to music, I was attracted to the “colors” of sound and the “sounds” of colors,” he says. […]
from “Trans-colouring” (by Massimo Venuti, Milan – Italy)
Franzini’s paintings retain traits which seem to distinguish them in a particular way from other more or less successful experiments which we have seen. This all the more reason considering the fact that his activity also takes place in the musical ambit. […] His artistic way of thinking is abstract, and yet the choice of the lines and the colors manage to transform themselves into a sensation and even, with vague yet precise strokes, into an image. The lirical tension on the lines, is here composed or reorganised in a dramatic function which results convincing because of the more marked allusion to the psycological event underlined by the figurative (and not therefore by the figurative representation in itself), both in his calm paintings an in his more tens ones. The linear geometry is therefore extemely rational an yet unburned from the “cold” peremptory violence which is very often associated whith the concept of rigour: here the sense exsactness is so to say surpassed by the fading of the colours and by the lirical inspirations which silhouette and vitalise the mathematical secret. Evident equilibrium of the linear force is then represented by Franzini’s use of colour. In spite of the diverging tensions of many of his paintings the overall result is always that of relative naturalness and mellowness: this is due to the methodical use of the “sfumato” which produces that sense of transcolouring which is similar to the orchestration of musical impressionism, where the same chord changes colours whith the imperceptible varing of the instruments that follow one another. […] Perhaps the musician has helped the painter, beyond the image we manage to perceive the world to which Art unconsciously alludes, and we have the task to witness: the symbolic traits and the ethical traits.
from “Existential metamorphosis” (by Faber, Modena – Italy)
Silvio Franzini’s paintings form perceptive stimulus which soon becomes before our eyes, sensation which give us stimulating input, for their pursuit of comunicativness, whith only signs and colours. Coming into contact whith Franzini’s painting universe is like suddendly funding oneself a part of a surrealistic dimension, I would almost like to say, trascendental, where you can discover the infinite resources of the fervis fantasy of an artist who which skilled “toning down” and subtle play of light and shadows takes us to the border between dreams reality. Abstract symbolic creation, fruit of a timeless archetype speel sometime suddendly broken off, sometimes faded “trans-colorings” which form geometric structures, fantastic architecture, delicate shreds of dreams… Franzini accomplishes, whith immediacy those abstract forms which he comunicates his poetic sensibility and his timorus tension in the act of graspin and indistinct fleeting vision. […] In this abtract works you can read immediate conformity between sensibility and inner reality, proportioned to the existential phenomenology of contemporary man. […] Colours light and shadows, rhitmically distributed, whith acquired gestural freedom and that full and marked sign, converge to underline Silvio Franzini’s pictorial magic which remains in your memory, in particular for that extraordinary atmosfere fused whith the fantasy and existential problems of his inner world.
