Anselmo Francesconi Biography
Born in Lugo di Ravenna, Anselmo Francesconi attended the artistic high school of his hometown, where he graduated. He then enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, graduating in 1945. In the same year he left for Milan: he again attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Brera and graduated first in painting (with Aldo Carpi in 1947), then in sculpture (with Marino Marini who awarded him honors in 1950). He studied Iberian art in Spain thanks to a scholarship and then, in 1951, he settled in Paris, dedicating himself exclusively to sculpture for a few years. He then worked in Milan, Panarea, Paris and London, gradually turning more and more towards the pictorial experience. In fact, since the 1960s, the pictorial cycles have followed one another: "The Massacre", "Telentrope" (Robot), "The Doors", rooms that close on tragedies but then reopen on man, to find him and grasp his reality. Finally "The Masks", objects which, when affixed to the face, fix a partial image rigidified on a role or attitude, chosen or imposed but in any case grotesque, tragicomic, exacerbated: another form of alienation. The latest cycles are entitled "Bacchanalia" and "Dinamici": the physical movement represents the revolt of the individual who pits his own bodily and elementary energy against the false complexity of technological society and the orgy of consumption. In these paintings, the frenetic rhythm of the popular dance merges with that of the rioting crowd. Each cycle corresponds to a profound need of the artist, who each time seeks the most suitable language to express himself. His personal vision of the world and of art, in fact, never supported the artistic trends of the moment but instead often preceded them. "The Massacre", for example, is an energetic and dramatic reaction to the violence inflicted with impunity on an entire population. The "Telanthropist", however, preceded the advent of the "star wars" by a good decade: the dizzying development of technology and its negative effects, partly still unknown, on man and on the precarious balance of nature, are today of great actuality. From 1970 to 1973, Anselmo had already sensed and foreshadowed the problems. Finally, the "Dynamics", from the 80s, make us think of the people of Seattle and their forms of demonstration and struggle. In 1982 sculpture blossomed again in his hands: Anselmo filled his house and studio with dozens and dozens of anthropomorphic wooden beings, halfway between the animal and vegetal worlds, which he called "Selva", and which he would have liked to create in a second time in iron or other metals. In this plastic and scenographic explosion, the artist expresses a panic love for life in all its forms, for the universe, where man no longer acts as dominator and exploiter of nature, but as an integrated element in a vast vital conglomerate and complex. From 1996 to 2004, the year of his death, Anselmo lived and worked in Milan.
