Italian artist Aguggiaro makes Bangkok solo debut
Italian artist Franco Aguggiaro’s debut solo art exhibition in Bangkok, “Venice And The Carnival”, takes the audience through a nostalgic, almost virtual-reality-like tour of a typical Italian carnival set within the historical environs of the city of Venice, the place of his birth.
Aguggiaro, who had his first exhibition in 1967, opened an art studio in Nice in the 1980s and enjoyed a working relationship with Ettore Russo until the latter’s death in 1992. That year Aguggairo was knighted by the president of Italy.
On show at Sathorn 11 Art Space are 30 paintings and 20 more stored in an archive that unveil Venice and its famous carnival, which began in 1094. The annual festival takes place during the week before Lent in the mostly Catholic country and is marked with music, dance, baroquial costume and masquerade.
The vivid, strong colours bring to life the characters and setting. The artist’s style, which he has mastered for over five decades under some of the best painters in the world, is interpreted through positioning of characters in various parts of the city, the wearing of the mask and fanciful dress, while mysticism permeates each painting. The halo of light and the lurking of shadows also add to the mix, captivating the imagination and leaving us with a sense of anticipation.
Aguggiaro seems content with bringing on the canvas the experiences that most touched him as a young boy. The emotions are conveyed in his choice of colours and the element of reality that makes his exhibits all the more powerful and meaningful.
His decades of experiences working in both the US and Europe leave him with little room for error as he attempts to portray the upper-middle class out and about at the carnival. There is probably only one painting with clear religious connotations: a priest lurking in the shadows while a woman is seen putting her finger on her lips while another women speaks.
Besides scenes of the carnival, Aguggiaro, who studied design and artistic nude painting in Nice, London, Paris and Stockholm in the late 1960s before returning to Rome to study at the Academy of Art, has also added to this collection a typical day in Venice.
In one such painting he has managed to capture a scene of what it once looked like from the window of his childhood bedroom. Another showcases a wide angle view of the Venezia Dal Canal Grande, which forms one of the major water-traffic corridors in the city. The inside of Venetian Arsenal, a complex of former shipyards and armouries clustered together, is also chronicled with just the right amount of sunlight, providing a glimpse of the boats that docked there in the past. Others document a typical day in a middle-class home, with freshly washed clothes hanging on the clothesline, to a man rowing his boat to reach the other side of town.
Probably one of the best ways to enjoy Aguggiaro’s paintings is by observing how he uses the contours of the shapes, some vibrant and some blurred, to get across his message.
The artist, who left his home country aged 17 in the hopes of honing a career as a painter in other parts of Europe, is having his first art exhibition in Thailand after five years of residing in Phayao province.
Franco Aguggiaro’s solo art exhibition, which runs until March 30, is housed at Sathorn 11 Art Space. Visit www.sathorn11.com or call 02-004-1199.