Francesca Magro’s work

by Luca Pietro Nicoletti, 2010

The problem of the flesh: from the Körper to the Leib, from the representation to the fr.
(The following text is an extract of the original critical text)

Francesca Magro has recently returned to the pure painting, leaving in brackets the experience of plexiglass and of reliefs, to develop the most figurative accents […]. Also in the most properly abstract phase of her work, to tell the truth, Francesca Magro has always felt the color in a strongly contrasting, aggressive way […]. In a series of small drawings by pen she has set up the compositive outline of the representation where a real theatre of the biomechanical transformation comes on stage. In a fluctuating space, a series of actions on the human figure, begins to live, like vivisections, eviscerations, installations of prostheses of different kinds on the human figure: the human being is suffering a radical metamorphosis of hybridization with the machines and the technology. The scientific world, Francesca Magro seems to say, is transforming the individual not only relatively to perception and to the sensitive experience, but it is submitting him to a more radical mutation, it is making of him an wide-ranging experimentation object. From sensitive flesh recording the sensory inputs from the external world, the body here has become lifeless flesh, submitted to a theatre of unheard of cruelties, but observed with narrative indifference. […] These figures do not suffer, maybe, because their flesh is not able to percieve the pain, just because it has become a physical essence, a pure organic matter, which is suitable for the experimentation. After all, these figures have an amazed robot expression, and they move jerkily, almost as an assimilation is underway between the man and the machine, between the human being and the humanoid.