As a kid I used to play a game. I used leave the adult world and hide in my own special place, made of colors, sensations, fictions of the mind and spirit. It was a very simple game, without rules or goals. While in a field among the flower, or in a meadow of poppies, or in a greenhouse full of carnations I just had to half-close my eyes and let myself go, get lost in the color, imagine to be part of it. The details would blur and I felt one with the light, closer to the Spirit. I have not plaid that game in a long time, but meeting Franco Giannelli’s colors has taken me back in time to a game so simple and yet refined. It has taken me back searching once again for the Spirit through the simple act of closing my eyes. Franco’s brush is kind, suffused, almost dreamy. To observe his work it is like opening a door on a world which is beyond. It is beyond the nature, which Franco interprets, beyond the photographic detail, in a dimension that is pure sensation. A sensation that distills the essence, that plays while in search of its Being.
Earth and Sky speak the same language, they love each other until they join together, because in the universe that Franco Giannelli creates there are no boundaries. The inflorescences become stars as well as the stars turn into flowers. Yellow and blue combine to reach their nadir, the green of the fields painted with strong visible brushstrokes, remind me of Van Gogh’s paintings - maybe it's just a sentimental response I cannot resist.
"Tempestoso" (Stormy) is a work of art that I think that generates the whole poetry of the painter Franco Giannelli. It is almost Shakespearean and not only because of the title. The storm can be interpreted as a crisis of Nature that usually we consider on our side: calm and kind. But you know the crisis is bivalent, it can be seen as an opportunity. The painter composes the sky, the sea and the earth with the same colours, changing the dominant tone. From the strange perspective that he creates, I do not understand if those fleshly globes are crowns of trees or fabulous inflorescences from which – who knows? – tomorrow, you will see a new species of human beings... According to me, Franco Giannelli is the architect of a dreamworld and the dream is nothing more than prime reality.
Franco Giannelli's works have the subtle, profound, and delicate appeal of nature, captured in its unique moments. Through color the artist creates feelings, shades of a flowery dream, excitement, resistance, movement, the adagio, the capriccio, the ray or the rest of a rose. Franco Giannelli skillfully shows the symbiosis of the plant world in a metaphor of color, in a whirlwind of lyrical tones. The glow, the heat, the colors of the wind, the essence, the ethereal are dialogues written multiple times with a touch of color. The flowers, which are his "characters", with their delicate shades, "melodically" enhance the work of the artist, whom I would define as the "artist of color".
Franco Giannelli’s works of art could be defined as studies of flowers in the landscape if we wanted to find a restrictive genre to refer to. Except that these flowers scenaries do reveal something else. They are, I could say, metaphysical poems for the eye – the eye that dreams, asks, worries, hovers for a while, withdraws, but then looks again and finds itself in a horizon which is more and more familiar and surprising, an endless changing horizon. In Sera d'estate the sunlight wraps discreetly the landscape, while puffs of fine dust lay down inspiring the silence of the long summer evenings. At times these landscapes-poems evoke the secret and imperceptible rhythm of nature (Tiptil), its rustling Fruscio its inner music that make us dream looking at the flowers swaying in the wind (I colori del vento ) or, the gold evocative of essences
(Oro, Oro di terra, Essenza).
In this selection of works the painter Franco Giannelli succeeds in finding a peculiar chromatic harmony in every painting, suggesting even tactile sensations as in the sun dance Danza del
sole or the swaying of flowers in the wind as in Fiori... Farfalle.
In Franco Giannelli’s work a delicate and solitary nature, deeply mediated by his brush and soul, becomes poetry. Its substantial formal elegance is always in balance with his sensitivity, which inhabits the described landscapes. Through a language of refined shades of color, filtered by soft light, Giannelli’s landscapes suggest romantic atmospheres born in the artist’s memories. It is a long experience that Giannelli unfolds in his paintings with personal interpretation and intense emotion.
Laying in a meadow, touching, smelling, listening to the breeze whispering through the grass, and being aware that nature communicates. She invites us to a dialogue, and a reflection. And than to gaze and realize that the green is made of hundreds, thousands shades of green, and so are the other colors. Through his interpretation and his brushes Franco Giannelli makes us aware of the life of a flower, like the life of man, who is fighting against darkness, and then comes to light and becomes part of the wonderful nature. To store sensations and then being able to express them either with words or colors…it is just the fulfillment of the eternal questions. And when the “disease” of color is inside us the perfect union of ethic and esthetic takes place. Beauty becomes the ideal and carries us, through feelings of satisfied fullness, to moments of peace with ourselves.
