Franco Guerzoni

Franco Guerzoni was born in 1948 in Modena. At the beginning of the seventies he used photography as a tool of representation, in 1972 his “Frescoes”, in ’73 his “Archaeologies” followed by the “Anthropologies”, research linked to the aspects of cultural stratification and the idea of ” ancient” as loss. In the eighties he was involved in the creation of large wall maps that investigated the idea of an imaginary geography, “Travel Maps”, “Grotteschi” and “The Forgotten Wall”, at the end of the same years he worked on the surface understood as depth. He presented “Decorations and ruins” in a solo room at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Since then he has continued, through large cycles of works, his investigation into time and the poetics of ruin, a sort of archeology without restoration. Since 2006, following the unconcealment of a body of works created with the use of the photographic medium by the author in the seventies, he has presented “Landscapes in dust” at the GAM in Turin, since then his research has been accompanied by a real activity of reunion or transfer that goes from the painting to the actual wall, chasing the dream that connects the previous attempts aimed at the creation of a sort of bas-relief, constant in all his work, towards an idea of light sculpture born of the new attention to wall. So the “Forgotten Wall” becomes the real privileged location of his most current work.