Works
The discipline of the hand:
the 30s-40s, the bourgeois rigor, the refinement of the embroidery, the colors of the painting, an attentive and poignant love for beauty that is expressed in infinite forms.
The 50s-60s: the energy born from a deep and ancient earth, which from humid and large clay loaves finds expression and experience in large shiny ceramic panels with reddish-brown glazes.
The 70s-80s: the delicacy of the points that pierce the ancient canvas
to seek the female heart.
The 90s-2000s an exhausting and always green expressive research, long, very long years of work in a world of men: my mother.
Annamaria De Benedictis
Franca Maranò in her studio in Bari. Photo by Angelo Saponara.
"Painting as testimony of one's own experience: this is the trace we can offer to read Franca Marano's canvases, points of life, which reveal in their articulation the traces of the existential path of an individual, of a generation, of a profession that of the artist, and of a sex. the female one, still today underestimated and often oppressed. "
(Lia de Venere, 1998)
"I don't think we can speak of Franca Maranò's ceramics with cordial disengagement, as for objects that can be relegated to the sphere, albeit noble, of craftsmanship or decoration. Panels, vases, plates, plates by Maranò instead reveal plastic strength, vitality of material and richness of sign that make it works with autonomous dignity. A complex encounter of culture and sensitivity: an authentic sign of personality. "
(Pietro Marino, 1968)
"My painting is a commitment aimed at fixing an image of indefinite extension to create a psychic space, with the intention of a truth that goes beyond the meditate. The space, from an optically real and tangible dimensional structure on the canvas, is transfused into an idea permeated with continuity in which the original germ of being participates in the sense of the infinite with light. Together they complete each other in the sign in which the weight is canceled out, and the sign frees echo of inner impulses, natural cadence of deep rhythms, that breaks the bonds of matter and time and offers itself as a mystical presence from which it springs pure, in primordial harmony of themes. "
(Franca Maranò, 1969)
"The idea of ​​motion transpires from the highlighting of forms that are animated by lines of force, variously attracted or repelled to each other, reported in a plurality of works so that the action, not forced within a single and delimited space, alive in ideal continuity. Material support capable of allowing the typicality of the concept is aluminum in foil which, by retaining the presence of substance, overcomes the inert state to make itself a participant in the sign, with the intention of a balanced existential reason aimed at overcoming every dehumanizing technological conditioning. "
(Franca Maranò, 1971)
"My last operation was carried out by meditating on behaviors oriented on motifs of sewn plots, for a precise mental choice. The operation itself leads back to a closer relationship between artistic activity and external reality, through the recovery of work with the needle, now abandoned due to industrial expansion. I made use, therefore, of the warp weaves, also to try to arrive at an interpretation of the reasons for modern anxiety, thus bringing me back to an activity of yesterday to understand the tension of today."
(Franca Maranò, 1976)
"You have to start from the clothes to remember the salient stages of his production. He began to exhibit them in 1971: sackcloth garments worn by the artist herself or available to the public, cut in the shape of a habit, archetypes also in the model, dresses, textiles and, by extension, even a new skin with which to show oneself or, vice versa, hide. "
"Large-scale works blossom with delicate thoughts, subtle ironies, intelligent provocations. The artist's men's clothes are finally embodied in the pleasantness of feelings, in the eternal flow of time, in the fiery heat of passions. Reason and Desire are the two. poles around which Franca Maranò constructs the precious garments of art that shines with infinite truths. The works teem with an unusual life, with anxious joys, with innocent freshness: the suffused tones of pink illuminate the images
and even death appears painted with light. "
(Santa Fizzarotti, 1983)
"The graphic sign of Maranò takes precedence over the other compositional elements and is the substance and structure of images whose interest is all condensed in a reality desecrated by the ambiguous world of man. This desecration is visually highlighted through the transfiguration of the characters, whose gestures are analyzed in their various expressions of arrogance, sarcasm, rebellion, rivalry and perhaps even fear. "
(Filiberto Menna, 1985)
"The theme of my work refers to my state of mature woman who pierces the canvas with a purely feminine instrument, going back to the past, its expectations, its disappointments, the happy moments and the thoughts that unfortunately come to mind. "
(Franca Maranò, 1999)