Memory is not soothing unless it has already faded away.
Outlines loose their color, and only what our memory has chosen for us will come to surface, then each moment that you lived looses its significance to reach a new and more powerful meaning. More friendly, more reassuring, more acceptable.
On an opaque image floating in our mind, we delete imperfections with the help of the unconscious, retaining the details that made it memorable.
That is, in other words, nostalgia. Some people love to be lost in it, others drive it away with all their strength, like an enemy. All of us, like it or not, are its prisoners. Francesco Granieri decides to go further, and turns it into the material to mold his artworks.
After a few years spent traveling around the world, Francesco stops to catch his breath and goes back to Turin in order to refresh his ideas, with the help of the homely atmosphere. The places where he has lived, often straitened like Mexico and Philippines, live inside him and can’t be cancelled, leading him to reflect on the value of experiences. Real chapters of life come back and knock persistently , they won’t leave him in peace; he decides to go along with them and looks for the right materials to give them a solid shape.
The result is a variety of artworks (some in concrete, some others on canvas, others still hybrid) with a common taste for melancholy and rediscovery of the past, that Francesco handles like small fragments of a world that has fallen apart.
Suggesting us that memories are dead thoughts now, but that they’re still vivid. Like the stars.
A garland of stars on a strand that you can wind up again when you feel like it.

Paolo Vizzari, March 2014