Rewind: Franco Colalillo
xpace, Toronto
Franco Colalillo's paintings are an antidote to big photographs, cutesy doodles and fashionable irony. Perhaps this is because he's an architect, less interested in or aware of art-market trends than simply in love with architecture and painting. He has worked on building projects around the world, including in Shanghai and Hong Kong, and it shows both in what he paints and how he does it.
The paintings are huge. Single- or multi-panel images of vertical industrial structures—cell towers, cranes, water towers, pile drivers and so on—dominate the subject matter, though he's also fascinated by the bamboo scaffolding used on construction sites in much of Asia. Each painting originates in a photograph, which he manipulates and enlarges on a giant photocopier, then pastes onto plywood boards, each roughly the size of a door. But he often erases the surrounding physical context of these objects in order to focus on their essential structure, or he pushes them further into abstraction by isolating and painting just a small segment of the original. As a result, some of his paintings are immediately recognizable, while others look only vaguely familiar, their calligraphy-like marks floating between the representational and the abstract.
Most of the paintings are dark red and black—black for the structures and red for the negative space surrounding them. A few are black and white, a quicker, easier first read than the red paintings, but ultimately less satisfying. They feel flat, whereas the red paintings have a wonderful depth. It is the result of layer after layer of thickly applied paint that Colalillo has mixed together by combining gesso, plaster and dark wood stain (surely only an architect would make art about the built environment using construction materials). As a result, the black bones of the structures appear frozen in a slow-moving, viscous, blood-red ether.
Colalillo calls these paintings "icons." Icons of what? No doubt of the industrial age, which continues to recede further and further into the past. Certainly also of our cities, of progress and the constant drive to build up and tear down, or simply to ignore the no longer useful and build around it.
But these paintings also capture something of the beauty and sadness of human striving and creativity. We erect buildings. We make art. We write. We build families, careers and lives. We like to think it lasts. Then, one day in the future, someone else sifts through the detritus of our lives, turning it over in their hands, curious perhaps from a historical point of view, but incapable of experiencing what it meant to its maker.
Like the Byzantine icons we now admire for their strange beauty, intricate design and emotional remoteness, Colalillo's icons feel like gorgeous, inaccessible remnants of the past. Yet all icons once played a living role in society.
Summer 2005
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