Painting, Drawing and Etching for Francesca Magro: Working Strategies

by Luca Pietro Nicoletti, 2013

text in the catalogue “The sign incarnate”

Francesca Magro attended the Academy of Brera between 1976 and1980 in what was to be a crucial period for the Art world shaken to its foundations by the transavantgarde movement.
Ready or not even those artists far removed from such inclinations could not fail to be in some way conditioned both by its use of colour and its personalised use of drawing as an exploratory instrument. Thanks to the teachings of Renato Bruscagli in Urbino, the artist discovered engraving which she continued to explore for the remainder of the decade and then resumed in more recent times. From that experience Francesca has kept an immediate approach to etching copper sheets skipping the intermediate preparatory stage. This threadbare line, curled upon itself, owes much to Giacometti and others in the immediate post war period allowed Francesca to obtain a solid and definitive form. These drawings satisfy a personal need of the artist without having to visualise an impersonal theoretical position she had held in the seventies: this drawing frees the hand on both paper and wax, instinctively and not without the anti-academic desire to subvert classic canons of beauty.