Franco Gentilini - The Encounter (from Orlando Furioso: Canto Twenty-eighth)

Surrealist aesthetics emerged around the 1920s and encompassed all fields of artistic research. Specifically, in the visual arts, Surrealism sought to explore the human subconscious and translate it into artwork through a mechanical writing process based on dream analysis. Consequently, Surrealist artworks propose the representation of a dreamlike dimension, completely dissociated from reality. Much of Franco Gentilini's pictorial and, especially, graphic production can be associated with Surrealist influences, in the creation of an alternate dimension inhabited by alienating elements, subverting all rules of space and time. Unlike historical Surrealism, represented by painters such as Dalí and Magritte, Franco Gentilini did not employ a hyper-objective language but developed his own, decidedly more expressionist style.

Franco Gentilini's style is the fruit of personal research that has led to the creation of his own surreal, fairy-tale world. In constructing his characters, Franco Gentilini draws inspiration from a fantasy-filled Middle Ages, where subjects are the product of colorful synthesis. Formally, this research is based on a high-level graphic elegance that marries perfectly with the artist's boundless imagination. This is particularly evident in his lithographs, which display the use of bold lines to delineate figures and objects. In Franco Gentilini's Surrealist Expressionism, the figures have a significant plastic connotation, but their individual features are eliminated, leaving them almost like mannequins, automatons moving with mechanical gestures. The sense of alienation is further accentuated by the artist's creation of a complex space, not univocal, but constructed from multiple perspective lines.

Franco Gentilini was born in Faenza in 1909 and passed away in Rome in 1981. He studied his city's ceramic tradition and later completed his artistic training in Bologna. In 1929, he moved to Rome, where he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts. His art, fairytale-like, dreamlike, ironic, and colorful, was expressed not only in painting, but also in graphic design, set design, and book illustration.

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