10 Apr 2012

Musée Beurnier-Rossel in Montbéliard presents : Luca Francesconi 

For his solo show at the Beurnier-Rossel Museum, Luca Francesconi has chosen the moon, that meeting point between the physical and the spiritual, as his guiding motif. Centered on the idea of transparency and absolute light, new sculptures and installations by the artist fill the venue, transfiguring this former private mansion.

Living along the banks of the Po, Luca Francesconi examines through his art the ties between man and nature, and the connections between space and time. The desire for an ethnological approach runs throughout his works, which display his deep interest in popular art and rural traditions. Set up as installations, Francesconi's pieces focus particularly on the materials that go into them, which range from rock crystal to poppy flowers.

Shells, slugs and fish figure among the living things that fill Francesconi's imagination and possibly the museum galleries … Linked by their transparency and a similar effect of inner luminescence, they absorb the rays emitted by the neon lights, the sun and the moon, and, in doing so, become pieces of sculpture.

On the glazed ceramic stove or near the tinted windows of the 19th-century galleries, ikebana arrangements of farm plants are displayed like relics of an earlier grain-growing era.

A lunar sphere makes an appearance in one space after another, increasing the angles and points of view, continuously giving off light, a light that changes according to the hour, day and season. At the same time, the slug, a creature that mostly moves about at night by the light of the moon, shows us a world in constant motion from its bed of loam.

The exhibition changes then in time with the stars and the flow of their light, from spring to summer, for a renewed visual and sensual perception.

The moon's echo here is the echo of two projects in fact, united by their duality of transparency and opacity. While the show in Montbéliard is all about light, the exhibition at CRAC in Altkirch makes plain it is darkness that lies at its heart, presenting a series of opaque sculptures and objects in a shadowy gloom.


The Rhineland Center of Contemporary Art (CRAC) of Altkirch will be showing additional works by Luca Francesconi from 14 June to 16 September 2012.

An artist book is published on the occasion of the exhibition. (Ed. Kaleidoscope Press, Milan)