Franco Rasma
More light

Name: Franco Rasma
Start: 2021-06-13 00:00:00
End: 2021-09-26 00:00:00
Location: Foundation 107

Foundation 107

Turin, Piedmont, Italy

The show

Fondazione 107 presents Mehr Licht, a personal exhibition by the artist Franco Rasma. The exhibition is spread over the entire exhibition space of via Sansovino 234 in Turin. As many know Mehr Licht is the title that Rasma uses for all his exhibitions as well as for all his works. Mehr Licht means "More Light". The inspiration comes from the famous sentence pronounced by Goethe on his deathbed and interpreted by those present as the need to open up to a new world. Perhaps his sentence had a more literal than symbolic meaning, but whatever Goethe's real intentions were, Rasma decides to adopt it. From the 1980s to 2005 Rasma returns the images of his paintings by subtracting the previously stretched charcoal patina from the amber-colored paper surface used as a support. In this period the artist paints with coal only and it is the action of unveiling that reveals a painting made of pure light, hence “Mehr Licht”.

A substantial selection of paintings and sculptures will be exhibited at the 107 Foundation: around 115 paintings and 35 sculptures that retrace the production of the last 10 years. In the central hall the exhibition refers to the anthropological museums of the great civilizations. They are concrete heads that bring us back to the ancient “Erme”, the propitiatory sculptures of ancient Greece placed to adorn the streets of Athens. On the heads the artist impresses small scissors, bird beaks, squares of a chessboard. Sometimes flowers or stacks of scissors come out. Of recent production we will exhibit the houses, also with bird's beaks protruding from the roof and reaching towards the sky. The beaks are not wide open waiting for food to call for help, but they are proud and seem to defy the sky. There will also be the checkerboard walls, the houses engraved by devastating fractures and the fire that breaks out from the window, a premonitric sculpture made shortly before the attack on the Twin Towers. The latest sculptures, the concrete stairs, are born from a dream that the artist repeats frequently and in which he incessantly travels an uphill staircase barefoot, a path that, step after step, never reaches its end.

The corpus of the paintings exhibited allows to deepen the pictorial work of the master and is grouped by cycles. Rasma is a painter of minimalist matrix. He paints with only two impalpable elements, light and shadow, giving body to images that originate from dreams. Rasma's paintings from 2005 onwards are made on wooden boards, the preparation is done with plaster of Bologna and the paintings are in oil, all classic elements in the hands of the artist. His is a timeless art that sinks and gets lost in our roots to lead us to understand who we are, where we want to go and reassure us that each of us has a place in this world.

Rasma's work comes from the dream, as he himself says: why don't you remember dreams? He remembers them with reality and returns them in the form of paintings and from the last years of sculptures. The intangibility of the painting and the concreteness of the concrete, the material with which the heads are molded, are the polar elements that Rasma relates. Concrete is heavy, it does not reflect light, it absorbs it, transforming the head into an accumulator of images and information. Paintings and sculptures exchange subjects, contaminate each other, draw from a common archive of simple elements that belong or have belonged to the artist and are now preserved in his memory.