Glib Franko is a young Ukrainian artist who works with classic expressive media such as painting and graphics, of which he masters a wide range of technical and stylistic refinements deduced from the observation of the masterpieces of art history, which in his creative language amalgamate with spontaneity and balance generating absolutely contemporary atmospheres. The of him is an allusive and delicate figuration that uses natural landscapes and everyday situations as a pretext to experiment with the infinite possibilities of color to magically reinvent reality. The subjects to which he dedicates himself are very heterogeneous and vary according to the project that from time to time connects the different series of images: we find domestic interiors and exteriors, dreamlike and sketched human figures, pieces of abstract painting and fragments of a luxuriant nature, which looking carefully, we see as the dominant aspect of all the scenes he paints.
Beyond the visual pretext attributable to snapshots of reality, what interests the artist is to experiment with a process of reworking of the visual memory in which airs, transparencies, thicknesses and measures blend together to restore the imprint of a moment recalled in a potentially infiniteduration. The canvas becomes the place for the transformation of the world into a chain of images belonging to a personal symbolic universe, in which life is not lost, on the contrary it finds itself in the delicacy of a changing imprint that manages to reconcile apparently conflicting notions such as "sensitivity" and "method". It is an invention that rediscovers the roots of doing and that does not accept any ideological presupposition, but which at the same time seems to imply that art, as Claudio Parmiggiani wrote in A faith in nothing but all-encompassing (2010), "is stronger than reality, solely for a faith in a dream ". Glib Franko's sensitivity is guided by a method, which in turn guides the movements of the brush in order to resolve everything it encounters in a sensitive chromatic emulsion that materializes the instant with precise, but also fleeting and light strokes. His approach to painting is somewhat reminiscent of the Impressionist style: in this case, however, the goal is not to capture the unrepeatable luminous essence of a place or thing at a certain time of day and year as did the nineteenth-century French masters, but to condense the emotionality of a vision in an ambiguous mental panorama, lucidly turned to the tones of dreams and re-enactment, in which the viewers can project and decant their experiences.
One of the engines of Glib Franko's poetics is the celebration of the spectacular self-sufficiency of color, whose creative potential is implicitly assimilated to the capacity of nature to regenerate itself and to sneak up on itself even in the most inhospitable corners of the world. This is why the artist's paintings literally seem to exude nature, even when they appear to be focused on something else.
Presented by Biafarin Inc.
Biafarin Inc.
(Art Agent, Canada)
