Franco Fortunato - The Rediscovered City

The urban landscape was already a popular subject in the Middle Ages and Modern Ages, but predominantly in an idealized manner. Scenes of city life became typical themes with a more realistic interpretation starting in the 19th century. It is worth remembering that immediately following the realist movements of the 19th century, the Impressionists also placed great emphasis on the everyday, on everyday life, with a certain predilection, however, for the frenetic pace of the city, crowds, traffic, and typically bourgeois settings. The urban landscape is one of the most recurring subjects in Franco Fortunato's work, defining a highly interesting and original style. His city views draw inspiration from the tradition of 14th- and 15th-century Italian painting, highlighting its more abstract aspects, defining a dimension suspended between surrealism, metaphysics, and magical realism.

Franco Fortunato's training was based on the study of Tuscan painting between the 14th and 15th centuries. In this painting, the artist seems to replicate a typical late Gothic urban view, reviving the charm of its schematic order, irrational perspectives, and sidelong views. However, he contextualizes it within a contemporary aesthetic clearly inspired by Surrealism, through a landscape of magical colors and a suspension in an enigmatic and mysterious atmosphere. Franco Fortunato's contemporaneity is expressed in his exaltation of the most abstract aspects of medieval urban views. All this is resolved, formally, in a pure artistic approach that allows no pictorial effect in the definition of perfect geometric shapes and compact surfaces. Even the lighting effects, subjected to the same rationalistic taste, are imbued with a metaphysical-irrational suggestion that makes Franco Fortunato's works even more fascinating.

Franco Fortunato was born in Rome in 1946. His artistic training was self-taught, studying 14th- and 15th-century Tuscan painting (Lorenzetti, Sassetta, Piero della Francesca) and the contemporary art of Magritte and De Chirico. The result was a completely personal aesthetic that reconciles ancient turreted cities and other traditionally medieval subjects with surrealism.

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