“FOREVER SPRING”

During the course our lives we are often confronted with the impossible, whether it be an apparently insurmountable constraint or limitation – particularly when we are on the cusp of a major change. Sometimes we are at the mercy of events beyond our control (one can but patiently endure!) But, more often than not, we create our own constraints by drawing up figurative boundaries through which we experience life and measure our existence. These boundaries are both a form of familiar comfort and protection, but they do isolate us from the wider context.

Our tendency today is to disregard an essential part of the business of life; curiosity, freedom of expression, emotional growth, a context in which to challenge oneself and make sense of the unknown. By embracing these fundamental aspects of human experience, you are opening yourself up to a state of lightness and renewal. Throwing off the oppressive cloak of your own boundaries and limitations is to gain new awareness. This is the origin of my project.

The focus of my project is to approach those divisive elements and internal contradictions within ourselves from a fresh point of view: highlighting the crack, the fissure, the breaking point of the super-structure so that it may yield; rendered fragile by one’s will to see beyond it, as it were. It is in this new landscape that we can embrace a wider horizon, a new emotional territory  and be fully present in the wider context our existence.

Francesco Maria Bandini

“FOREVER SPRING”

By Alessandro Romanini

Francesco Maria Bandini’s art is not limited to structuring an aesthetic process and making it usable, but focuses on a more articulate and complex operation.

First and foremost, his work is metalinguistic in nature. It aims to reflect, question and evolve a method, its purpose and, above all, the repercussions of evolutions on the artist himself as a person and as a creative.

The main objective is to investigate the role of the artist in this specific historical and existential conjuncture and his ability to impact reality in general and his existence precisely.

Bandini’s expressive strategy seeks to shake the widespread perception that crystallises our senses on an eternal present and a self-defined circumscribed space, which is reassuring and limiting. The artist does not want to be a thaumaturge but rather to restore sight to its virginity, making it capable of seeing beyond the surface of existence and grasping its strong and perceptive potential.

His creative strategy investigates the existing and the personal, combining biographical and personal dimensions with those of universal values in the final results.

Bandini’s photographic works are devices which ‘force’ the observer to participatory, active fruition, to give rise to further reflections and fruition paths with a high rate of subjectivity.

The artist’s finely designed expressive form combines ethics and aesthetics, wishing to conflict with the contemporary iconographic production system that churns out images that do not solicit the individual’s scopic function.

Bandini investigates urban reality in search of those interstitial elements that are deictics of a different reality that escapes observation and, thus, the perception-reflection-sense circuit, remaining anonymous and unproductive.

His relentless search for those elements, apparently insignificant but harbingers of that ‘eternal spring’ that can constantly reawaken provided it is activated by a gaze that is aware of the intrinsic potential in this dimension, is an invitation to the observer to identify with the artist, to obtain; as a result virginity of the gaze.

Bandini is part of that historically noble line of flâneurs, whose pioneers and theorists include Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, the Dadaists’ perambulations, the Surrealists’ investigation of the urban repressed, the Situationists’ psychogeography and the nomadic analysis of groups such as Stalker, as well as their natural, historical evolutions.

Alessandro Romanini:

Alessandro Romanini, a graduate in Modern Literature with a historic-artistic focus from the University of Pisa, has followed specialisation courses in art subjects, with particular reference to the various branches of contemporary art at the Universiè Stendhal in Grenoble and Leicester University. A lecturer in the theory of perception and psychology of form at the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, he collaborates with the Ministry of Education, University and Research in promoting the National Arts Award.

FOREVER SPRING / THE OPENING

THE WORKS

FOREVER SPRING / REPORTAGE BY ANNA DUBINI