About the Artist

Italian self-taught artist Francesca Borgo (b 1970) has been working professionally for over four years, creating soothing and dreamy abstract landscapes.
A former researcher in cognitive neuroscience and sport psychologist, she has transferred her passion and interest for brain functioning into her current aesthetic research. In her painting practice, she loves to mix different materials to enrich the visual experience with subtle tactile aspects, with the aim of emphasising the viewer’s perception of movement and time.
She is a frequent participant of London art fairs and works in Italy and internationally with interior designers on residential and hospitality projects. Her emotional and ethereal works are in private collections mainly in the USA and UK.

About Artist’s Work:

My research mainly focuses on our relationship to environment and climate. It’s a reflection about mankind’s need, as a species, to re-establish a long lost connection to earth.

My works don’t directly accuse the brutality of man’s aggression to earth. They invite viewers to feel the calmness, the poetry, the inner balance that nature can bring to our lives. It’s about awakening individuals with a whisper and a glimpse of how we could feel and be.

When I’m struck by patterns and rhythms, I immediately sketch them on scraps of paper and use them to build the textural configuration of the surface using sand. It can be anything – slight movements of tree branches, shining on the sea surface, sunbeam patches peering down and hitting dry leaves on the ground. This direct recall to nature is my way to bring earth straight to the canvas.

Tact and vision are an integral part of my works, to stimulate a first hand approach to the representation.

Depicting abstract landscapes is also my way to trigger an instinctive and non-conceptual reaction of ‘feeling of knowing’ in the viewer. This allows a first dialogue with the painting where the viewers feel at ease and are free to imagine and create their own narrative.

A dialogue that – I hope – may allow a sense of balance and connection to nature that can inspire anyone to protect the source of that balance. Hopefully, this connection will also suggest the need to experience a sense of eternal circularity, of not-disappearing and, ultimately, to keep caring.

I deem my works are mainly influenced by modern and contemporary artists, such as Zao Wou-Ki, Julie Mehretu, David Hammons, Wu Chi-Tsung. I’m also indebted by the suggestions coming from architects such as Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry.

What does “Home” mean to you: 

I have travelled and moved a lot since I was a kid. Home has always been a place ‘not to grow roots on’, a place to leave eventually.
To feel a sense of belonging, growing up, I always looked for points of reference different from walls, a specific view, those precise voices or smells that make part of our history and identity…
I found out to be in love with certain horizons, certain colours in the sky, clouds, birds flying in flocks, water stream flowing happily in springtime… Those natural elements were (and are even today) my friends, something I could find everywhere, I could trust in their presence.
This is what most often inspires my paintings – abstract landscapes that are not representing any given place, only my way of feeling connected to earth, rocks, wind, grass, waves, my feeling at home even if no one knows me.

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