MITOLOGEMA
Daniele Franzella – Solo show

RizzutoGallery is proud to present MITOLOGEMA – Daniele Franzella solo exhibition, curated by Alessandro Pinto. The exhibition will be inaugurated on Saturday 15 April 2023 at 5 pm and will remain open until May 20th, from Tuesday to Saturday, from 4 to 8 pm.

In MITOLOGEMA Daniele Franzella carries out a profound analysis of the meaning of the image in our time. An analysis that is shown in works that draw from different languages and semantics, realizing themselves through different mediums and materials. The works seem to be captured from a historical perspective, to then discard it by fragmenting the timeline and proposing other lateral and contradictory perspectives. Daniele Franzella’s two-dimensional and plastic images are all figures and symbols that dissipate or implode, and that lose their ability to affirm something certain. In each symbol/figure Franzella stages his relationships, his conjunctures, his connections and his aberrations, the almost uncontrollable polysemy of the symbol, whose mutable external figure is associated with a constellation of possible contents. The artist seems to dig into the meaning of the symbol and the figure as if following an “etymological suggestion” that brings us back to the symbol as a practice of juxtaposition and union of elements belonging to different fields – symbol from the Greek σύμβολον:  “juxtaposition”, derived from συμβάλλω, “to put together, to match” – and to the figure, – from the Latin “pretend, shape” – in the sense of an image which in its being ficta contains the idea of movement and fixity. Franzella’s symbols/figures are thus to be interpreted as mythologems, as an abstract and restless material that intermittently manifests itself in contradictory objects and surfaces, constantly shaped and transferred in the fallacious attempt to bring back its original meaning.

Daniele Franzella (Palermo – Italy, 1978) 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.