PAST CLUSTER P&P EXHIBITORS:
Francesca Rossi’s soft-hued aesthetic
One enigmatic composer of visual art from Cluster’s past exhibitions is the Italian Francesca Rossi, who lives and works in Milan. Rossi’s practice weaves through notions of familiarity and the discernment of her own comfort zone, of which she notes, ‘Through the photographic survey of my body and the physical context in which I move I express myself with a particular attention at the details. Through their details the objects show themselves in a new way and they change their sense.’
The briefest exploration of Rossi’s oeuvre will show an array of dazzling and disarming colours. Her work breathes ontological study into seemingly mundane objects of nature. The use of muted colour contrasted with lively colour makes for an interesting range of aesthetics.
Two particularly evocative photographs, both named Untitled, explore the pattern and form of water and colour. The swirls of water give the impression the liquid is undulating from an exterior force — possibly the gravity-driven movement of a stream.
These expressive forms are indicative of Rossi’s statement ‘through their details the objects show themselves in a new way’. In some ways, the twisting of the liquid somehow bends our reading of this photograph. We intrinsically know the sound and shape, or shapelessness of water, yet here we are certain of its differences.
In some ways Rossi’s work challenges our perception of familiarity. In John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (1984), the book explores the notion of home and familiarity, in particular, our ontological rooting in the world. Berger writes:
From Tia Bannon’s ‘Crowns’
Berger further writes ‘Without a home, everything is fragmentation.’
Rossi’s work seems to sit within the metaphorical confines of metaphysics and aesthetics. We as viewers know we are looking at work, but somehow Rossi’s work clinches both photographic realism and dream-like, ontological concepts.
Originally home meant the center of the world—not in a geographical, but in an ontological sense. Mircea Eliade has demonstrated how the home was the place from which the world could be founded. A home was established, as he says, "at the heart of the real." In traditional societies, everything that made sense of the world was real; the surrounding chaos existed and was threatening, but it was threatening because it was unreal. Without a home at the center of the real, one was not only shelterless but also lost in nonbeing, in unreality.
A testament to this notion of familiarity and ontological comfort zones is the artist’s Instagram page (@ph_francescarossi). A considered selection of works showcase her delicate and persevering eye, which features photographs of muted colours, always airy and elegant. A meshing of natural detail and colour seems to be Rossi’s continuing motif, though the soft-hued Sweet Quarantine series speaks of everyday objects in the home, whilst commenting on the universal and familiar conundrum of quarantine.
A smashed or cracked window usually suggests hostility or delinquency, though Rossi’s Sweet Quarantine 01 achieves the exact opposite. The fractured glass and soft hues aren’t threatening, and somehow seem inviting. The photograph reads as a study of form, reflection, even liberation — Rossi is presenting us with an aesthetic artifice that deliberately subverts our perception of form and meaning, in the most gentle way possible. We are not challenged or provoked, merely guided and gilded in bathed light and billowing forms.
Thank you for reading,
Cluster Team & Kieran McMullan.