Artist Daniele Franzella

Daniele Franzella

Palermo, 1978. Based in Palermo

Franzella addresses such themes as memory and identity – both individual and collective – through the symbols that define them. He deals with semantics and the concept of image as a manipulable language.
Poised between deception and disorientation, Franzella draws on the vast reservoir of history in a continuous application of contrasts and juxtapositions. Often acting on images and icons firmly embedded in the collective imagination, he changes their meanings through partial modifications. Through this socio-anthropological approach to art-making, truth and falsehood occupy a single plane in an asymmetrical correspondence between reality and its representation.
Decisive in this exercise is Franzella’s choice of materials and techniques; through his use of latex, terracotta, resins, digital prints on cement and digital frescoes, the sculptor initiates a game of paradoxes and inversions, penetrating the potential of matter, discarding every a priori physical or symbolic superstructure and rendering his materials gestures in and of themselves, collaborators in the genesis and concept of each work. Navigating a territory marked by the contrast between the persistence and evanescence of memory, Franzella’s work thus seeks to deconstruct its symbols, creating new codes through which to reinterpret and rethink individual and collective identities.
He debuted in 2005 with his participation in the exhibition Già e non ancora at the 51st Venice Biennale. Subsequent exhibitions include Cronache della città di Ur (2015) and Bethlem (2016) in Düsseldorf; the 2017 solo show Monumentale at Fabbriche Chiaramontane in Agrigento, followed by two 2018 shows in Palermo: Gloria at Fondazione Sicilia and Anabasi at the Casa del Mutilato. He was a finalist in the 19th Cairo Prize the same year.