The Bodies’ Shapeless Deviations
A Reflection on the Works of Francesca Magro

by Roberto Travaglini, 2013

text in the catalogue “The sign incarnate”

The aesthetic figures of the bodies created by Francesca Magro diverge and are far removed, almost ironically entertainingly so, not only from a concrete organic humanity but, above all, from past idealisations, all too often rationalistic, extolling qualities of perfection, balance and purity, straining to recapture a sense, mostly lost today, of the human and its existential profundity, brimming with paradoxical ambiguity and disturbing contradictions.

The aesthetic exchange between female neoclassic beauty and another possible manifestation of "beauty" as seen in Magro’s “Venus” tries to point out the different way beauty can be conceived by contemporaries, annihilated by the loss of a sense of self and dissipated in an acentric plurality of Being. This plurality becomes global and is reinforced by the massive introduction of new technologies, especially in the biomedical field which attempt possible manipulations of the human body and spirit creating false new ideological models.
Confronting Magro’s works can be seen as an attempt to confront one's own shadow, a confrontation which, if one accepts the inevitable pathogenic anxiety it inexorably produces, may be seen as a significant step towards a difficult yet conscious acceptance of the self.