Franco Angeli - Roman Eagle

The work draws on a pop aesthetic in its use of sign elements and their serial repetition. Pop Art was born in the United States in the second half of the 20th century as an interest/critique by artists of the contemporary "consumer society." All expressions of Pop Art presuppose a sort of double bond with the world of consumerism and the mass media. On the one hand, the artwork is reduced to a mere consumer product, thanks to the use of advertising language in the works and their serial reproduction through mechanical processes. On the other, it is the advertising images and consumer goods themselves that become works of art, as the most genuine and truthful expression of the new society.

This work is part of Franco Angeli's reflections on the symbols of power. In this case, the half-dollar eagle, a symbol of capitalism and one of the most recurring motifs in Franco Angeli's work, is redefined as the "Roman Eagle," establishing a connection between the Roman Empire and contemporary imperialism. This iconic symbol stands out in the center of the painting, reproduced in an almost mechanical manner. The rest of the painting engages with another theme typical of the Piazza del Popolo School, one that draws us back especially to Schifano. It is the banal and mass-produced star motif, interpreted as if reproduced by a flat, two-dimensional screen. The artist's aesthetic is so highly expressionist that the gestural brushstrokes and the dripping of paint seem to be interference on the monitor displaying the images. Everything, therefore, even what has now been rendered banal by mechanical or technological reproduction, is revitalized by the artist's recontextualization and his pictorial gestures, inspired by American Abstract Expressionism.

Franco Angeli, a Roman painter born in 1935 and died in 1988, was part of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo starting in the 1960s. This group of painters, which also included Mario Schifano, met at the Caffè Rosati and shared an artistic language inspired by Pop Art but with a new sensibility also influenced by the experiments of American Abstract Expressionism. The use of symbols of consumer society, repeated serially, is distinctly Pop, but their pictorial interpretation, whether dirty or textured, or using gestural techniques like dripping, offers a new vision and a different reconfiguration.

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