Franco DeFrancesca: Re-Evolver

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Franco DeFrancesca, "Nudge & Sway," 2021

pigment print on panel with resin, 23" x 60"

Newzones is pleased to announce Re-Evolver, a solo exhibition by contemporary Canadian abstract artist Franco DeFrancesca.

"With these combined perspectives the finished works in this upcoming exhibition impart my continuing practice of revisiting and exploring concepts and motifs in abstraction towards the realization of a 'picture object'." -Franco DeFrancesca on his newest body of work.

DeFrancesca explores mixed media as a mode of creating abstraction in the form of an art object. His artwork investigates the links between art, memory, history, and technology, using digital imaging as a means to navigate the territory between photography and painting. As a result of mixing references to photography and painting, these multi-media artworks represent reflections on contemporary visual culture charmed by minimalism, modernism, technology, and futurism.

DeFrancesca's artwork highlights visual, temporal, and spatial qualities combined with the physical and tactile. Applying a keen sense towards craft and a reverence towards materials and processes, the abstract image is integrated with an exposed support of layered plywood, then encapsulated beneath crystalline resin, creating an 'object of desire'. With it's physical depth and highly polished glean, these works reference minimalist industrial design and refer obliquely to the urbane.

Re-Evolver, DeFrancesca's newest body of work has evolutionarily and retroactively moved into differing and divergent directions. The first path is a return to more fundamental imagery that manifests a reduction to simpler graphics, sharper, bolder colours, and more defined contrasts that contain movement and contortion, rather than diffuse environments of stillness and suspension. Secondly, DeFrancesca explores a change to they physical shape and format of the 'picture object' that has been consistent in his previous artwork. Inspired by collaborative work with his son Michael, the shape has evolved from that of a rectangle and round, to the shape of a teardrop as a substrate. The teardrop has both a structural as well as organic quality, subtly encapsulating both flow and dynamism with suspension and impending dispersion.

Franco DeFrancesca lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1990, and obtained a BFA from the University of Guelph in 2005. DeFrancesca has exhibited in Canada and the United States, and his work can be found in private and public collections world-wide, including collections such as Cenovus Energy Ltd, Calgary, AB; Enbridge Inc, Calgary, AB; Nordstrom; the Department of Foreign Affairs, Ottawa, ON; Milestones, Toronto, ON; and Andbank, Brazil.