A splendid series of engravings by Franco Fanelli, dating from 1950 to the present day, make up this exhibition, curated by Alessandro Tosi and set up on the second floor of Palazzo Lanfranchi.
Geology and archaeology intersect in the Turin artist's engraved graphics, starting with the three works that chronologically open the exhibition: two versions of ‘The Dream of Gordon Pym’ (1985) and ‘Sentinel’ (1987).
Literary inspiration runs through the Turinese engraver's entire forty years of activity, from Poe to Melville, from Conrad to Lovecraft, from Borges to Landolfi, from Manganelli to Jesi, up to the poetry of John Donne, Gongora y Argote, Holan and Celan. These suggestions reverberate in themes and processes that enhance the material and process potential of engraving.
Fanelli also looks at the petrified yet metamorphic nature of the 17th-century Dutch engraver Hercules Seghers and the transmutation of ruin into nature, anatomy and landscape in Piranesi's archaeological investigations. In this sense, the two large ‘Shields’ of the ‘Sibyllae’ series (1987-89, the first created from the elaboration of the head of a humpback whale) accommodate magmatic concretions, the result of a palimpsest of signs in which even the surviving traces of repentances, abrasions and progressive bites take on the character of an image. The five works mentioned are the prologue to an exhibition that has its dominant theme in the exploration of time and its manifestation.
In ‘The Archaeologist's Dream’ (2010-2015) an imaginary mining excavation brings to light the traces of mysterious civilisations that predate geological time itself. In the 2014-18 triptych named after three different visionary bearers such as the archaeologist Schliemann, the writer and anthropologist Caillois and the revolutionary and utopian Blanqui, Fanelli instead shows how different views of the same stone radically change its ‘physiognomic’ possibilities.
In his most recent compositions, small archaeological fragments are combined with geological finds of different geographical origins and fragments of lithographic stones, graphite to compose domestic theatres (‘Circo minimo’, ‘Histoire d'une tête’, 2020) or imaginary maps conceived as ‘Tabulae lusoriae’. This ‘Stone Atlas’ has its concluding foils in the loricate torsos that surface in ‘Campo barbarico’, in the helmets constructed with stones and salvaged material (‘Characters in the Night’) and in the most recent work, where the ruins of Roman walls from the 3rd century implode to give shape to an imaginary ‘Monte Severiano’.
The essays in the catalogue are by Alessandro Tosi, Director of the Museo della Grafica, and Gianfranco Adornato, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
FRANCO FANELLI (Rivoli, Torino, 1959). He made his debut in the mid-1980s, holding his first solo exhibition at the Documenta Gallery in Turin. A professor of Engraving Techniques (today Art Graphics) at the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts in Turin since 1987, he has carried out his artistic research mainly in the field of traditional processes of engraved graphics (etching, aquatint, mezzotint, drypoint). He has exhibited in Italy and abroad in the main group exhibitions dedicated to this language (Pabellon Villanueva, Madrid; Museo d'arte contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa; Museum of Modern Art New York; Museo Marino Marini, Florence; Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh; Biblioteca Nazionale, Turin; Castello Sforzesco, Milan; Scuola Internazionale di Grafica, Venice; Fondazione Il Bisonte, Florence; Museo della Carta, Fabriano) and in important contemporary art exhibitions (Premio Sulmona; Galleria dell'Incisione, Brescia; Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona; Galleria Nazionale d'arte moderna, Rome). His most recent solo exhibitions include those held at the Simone Aleandri Gallery in Rome (2012 and 2020), the Federica Galli Foundation in Milan (2018) and the Library of Lugano (2019). The extensive retrospective dedicated to him by the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome dates back to 2016.
The opening of the exhibition will be on Friday 11 October at 12 noon, admission free.
The exhibition will be open until 8 December 2024 with these opening times:
- every day from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
