Gianfranco Basso

In Basso’s work, despite its undeniable originality, it is not difficult to read the signs of a profound reflection on the artistic past, particularly Italian.

In the precision of his mark-making—always concise and never exuberant—the rigor of the Renaissance can be glimpsed in backlight, while in the silent atmospheres and isolated protagonists, it is easy to recognize the meditative and solipsistic attitude of Metaphysical art, albeit closer to the essentialism of Morandi than to the classical nostalgia of De Chirico.

A meditative attitude is followed by discreet execution, filtered through the tight meshes of contemporaneity—the very contemporaneity of which the artist feels a part, perceiving it strongly yet without dogmatism, interpretable on a gnoseological level but not necessarily operative.

Here, Basso prefers the candor of an ancient and unexpected medium—embroidery—to the seduction of technological tools and the most current languages. A medium that is not exactly “à la page” in the virtual era, evocative of slow and silent making, stubborn and patient, of ancient traditions and domestic atmospheres, which in twentieth-century Italy had only two great exponents: Alighiero Boetti and Maria Lai.