10 Years of Weird Love
An exclusive NFT collection celebrating 10 years from the release of the iconic poster series.
Love can be a bargaining chip, a blackmail weapon, a source of deliverance, and a sweet slavery, but it always exposes us to dangers and reveals our deepest nature. The power relation it implies can also turn into a game, and games can be fun and painful at the same time.
We are always caught between these two tendencies: to expose and surrender to others or to protect ourselves and hideaway in search of shelter. Francesco’s work deal with the need to reveal and at the same time hide love. It’s a secret, delightful torture, and a terrible pleasure.
Against the artificial idea of perfection constantly and brutally imposed on us, these images deal with the imperfection of love and life, the defiance from what is clear, known, self-evident, and predictable. Imperfection is all that escapes pre-established models, ultimately is everything we are confronted with in life, including love, love above all. The problem is to accept it and to start from it.
No need to say this is exactly what makes Francesco’s illustrations captivating and triggers off the viewer’s fantasies, by presenting details of bodies, hints of feelings, and situations through foreshortened figures and perspectives.
We can see very little from a peephole, but do we really need to see much more?
The drawings are intentionally incomplete. Rather than exposing, they allude. In this lies their appealing imperfection and their erotic plus-value, the capacity to stimulate the imagination. This kind of love implies irony, to be intended as removal from conventional sense and easy interpretations, and a good dose of sarcasm, sharp as the knife blades of some of the plates, about the side effects of love and its commodification.
The fragility of the stroke is not a symptom of weakness but like in jazz music it denotes the capacity to grasp a mood. Unlike melodic music, solid and stable, jazz often seems on the verge of breaking apart, but it resists and recomposes itself, getting close to life and love more than anything else.
Francesco figures linger in a promising quiet that has an inner rhythm, inspired by music and songs. In a witty game of quotations, the sentences and titles of many drawings refer to homonymous songs (You Never Come Closer, A Taste of Honey, What Do You Want Now Darling, Sugar Never Tasted So Good). The overlapping titles make these prints virtual album covers, but also a combination of words and images like in Chinese traditional art.
this review is taken from my 2013 Solo Show Exhibition in Beijing, China: “The Greatest (Im)perfection is Love” curated by Mariagrazia Costantino.