FRANCESCO LOPEZ

VISIONI DI ROMA

curated by Gloria Porcella and Lamberto Petrecca

Friday, April 15th

7 pm

Galleria Ca’d’Oro

135 S. San Lorenzo Avenue

Suite 130

Coral Gables, Florida 33146

On Friday, April 15, 2011, Francesco Lopez will host a cocktail reception at Galleria Ca’ d’Oro Miami with the US showing of his most recent work “Visioni di Roma.” The gallery will feature various contemporary photographs, each of which were created using familiar imagery, realism and nature – all inspired by Lopez’s love of Rome.

Galleria Ca’ d’Oro was the perfect location to showcase this collection, “Visioni di Roma”, as the gallery’s main objective is to highlight and showcase Italian & European art to the US. Gloria Porcella and her business partner, Lamberto Petrecca, both will curate Lopez’s show. “The title of Francesco’s art show, ‘Visions of Rome’ compounds two loves. Love for a city, Rome, which no longer is a ‘physical’ place but becomes, in his work, an archetype of constant regeneration, and, precisely because of it, remains equal to itself across the time, becoming a category of the Spirit. Therefore not “a” city but “the” City.” – Lamberto Petrecca on Lopez’s “Visioni di Roma.”

Since the beginning of his career, Lopez has used photography to complement his art and with it he brings to life a composition, geometry, as well as details in which all these components transform an authentic emotion into a look that knows how to capture the essences of things in the particulars of reality. Inspired by a visit to the Coliseum in Rome and using his beloved Leica camera, Francesco Lopez created “Visioni di Roma.”

Among the 22 pieces in the collection of “Visioni di Roma,” one of Lopez’s favorite works is “Roman Graffiti,” a photograph measuring 90 x 120 cm. Lopez was inspired and loved the graffiti and combination of colors that he found on the side of an old Roman wall. This he feels is his tribute to one of his favorite painters, Jackson Pollock. This piece captures the essence of nature and Lopez as an artist. Lopez strongly believes “everything already exists in nature, even so great a work as the one done by Pollock.”

Francesco Lopez is a renowned architect and interior designer known throughout Europe and quickly making a name for himself throughout the United States. Lopez has always had an ardor for art and has been using photography as an expression of his art since he was at the university in Rome. He studied and graduated with a degree in architecture, never formally studying art. “I believe that you don’t need to study art to be an artist. Art is the expression of what you have in your soul” – Francesco Lopez.

Biography: Francesco Lopez, Architect and Interior Designer, was born in Rome in 1951. He has executed major projects internationally, in the main European cities, the Middle East and the Far East. Since beginning his career, he has used photography to complement his art, and with it he brings to life a composition, a geometry, as well as details in which all these components transform an authentic emotion into a look that knows how to capture the essence of things in the particulars of reality.
In his artistic works one can see the capability of the emotion-hunter, who, at the instant of a shot, catches and releases the moment of the flow of life, creativity in its most immediate sense. The artistic subject, the architectonic detail, are both extracted and observed in several different versions, chromatic repetitions, geometrical abstractions in which the world of reality merges into that of the imaginary, and the imagination plays the main role in moving objects close to elements which are completely unrelated to one another.

This expressive technique uses the crystallization of bright colors wrapped in a visual language that transforms the artist’s emotions into structures of pure color.
This is why his works move and surprise the spectator, in a sort of fusion of artistic genres that can produce a strong emotional impact; his is an artistic path that regenerates itself in a continuous exchange among art forms.

Laura Cianfoni, an architect and designer who has long collaborated with the artist, participated in the creation of several of his works.

Dedicated to Riccardo Olivieri

«Rome: the cradle of western culture and civilization. A place filled with artistic and historic testimonies that settle, layer after layer, across the centuries. The magnificence and grandeur of this city is filtered through Francesco’s kaleidoscopic lens, in an ideal “trait d’union” that connects history with the present, taking antique art with contemporary art, but always, Italian art.

This exhibition intends to bring a fragment of Italian art and culture to the USA, the New Continent, reaffirming, in this antithesis between old and new, the same polarization that pervades Francesco Lopez’s art. »

Gloria Porcella, Curator

« The title of Francesco’s show, “Visions of Rome” compounds two loves. Love for a city, Rome, which no longer is a “physical” place but becomes, in his work, an archetype of constant regeneration, and, precisely because of it, remains equal to itself across the time, becoming a category of the Spirit. Therefore Rome is not “a” city but “the” City. Francesco’s works encompass an orgiastic explosion of colors: a cold nuclear fusion of the Dionysian element, joyful, irreverent, and full of life, with the Apollinean element, frozen, crystal clear, but always vibrant, of Life and Art.

Art and Life, History and Chronicle, Emperors and Clowns, Popes and Courtesans, Death and Rebirth, Power and Revolution. Not Metaphysics. Non Surrealism. Not Hyperrealism.

It is Rome. Visions of Rome. »

Lamberto Petrecca, Curator

Catalogue

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Vernissage

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