Photography

Her photographs of December 2011 “Sustainable Labyrinths” prove that Francesca has acquired a distinguishing language, founded on framings that linger on a part rather than on the all of the buildings that she chooses to take as a subject. In each image Francesca finds the essential connection between the geometric segmentations of vision, marked by changing direction lines and by forms belonging to the variations of geometry itself, in a constant attention to harmony and to counterpoints of tones.
Even when, in the series “Reggio Emilia”, she confronts buildings, squares, interiors (from the Panizzi Library to the Synagogue) of her own town, or she adventures in the surrounding countryside, her way to see does not change: framings that take on the partiality (the historic Villa Levi), and attention to epiphanies of light revealing a world that did not seem to exist until that moment. The same considerations could be made for “Gualtieri in Cornice”, where, abandoning the village (with the massive Palazzo Bentivoglio in one of the most beautiful Italian squares), lines, often duplicating, reflected into the water, are no longer marked by soaring and net paths but by tremulous trunks and branches.
The charm of architecture returns in “Torino 1861 – Roma 2011”, in “Modern Architecture” and in “Historic Architecture”, where, in the London images – Francesca lived in the British capital for several years – vertigo and stunning burst into circular, elliptical, “mazy” shapes which could lead us to think that this is the modern haven of human constructions – and nevertheless soon she shows, in photographs of ancient structures, how, even if afar, the roots of modern construction are persistent: in the authentic modernity always beats the heart of the old.
“Between Dream And Reality”, “Because You’re Young”, “Markets”, “People” record the irruption of the human presence, often caught in fragments of bodies and faces, as if that partial way of devoting oneself was what most intrigues us: in “Markets” lie the stunning of vision facing the geometric compositions of products in the stalls. Francesca well knows that nature is a boundless treasure chest of shapes and lights, and that plants embrace numberless lines and geometries, and that roads and tracks traced in the ground by men lead towards the far horizon, towards the infinite: the moon itself is seen as a fragment, as would see the eye of a telescope in search of some secret. In “Frames” Francesca’s gaze penetrates in cracks, crosses an opening, beyond which pulses the light that reveals a vision of reality that becomes unexpected revelation.
Francesca Vezzani conquered an autonomous language, a mature technical fluency based upon, I believe, the awareness that truth and beauty of reality must be gathered in the fragments that reality itself holds and reveals, that the infinite and every ultimate root of things are not far from us, but lie in the finite, in what is close to our gaze – it was already understood by Giacomo Leopardi, “sitting and watching” nearby the bush “which cuts off the view of so much of the last horizon”.