WORKS AND PRESENTATIONS

PRESENTATION EXTRACTS FROM MONOGRAPHIES, CATALOGUES AND MAIN NEWSPAPERS

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All the works introduced in this site belong to public and private collections.

" So, Franz Borghese as writers comes wittily up by the side of Franz Borghese that draws, paints and sculptures, with the sneaking, however insinuating variety of a repertory parallel to that of his images and that represents the same world, however not subordinated to them, and neither descriptive of them. The pages describing fragmentarily the Waterloo day through flashes and flashbacks are not, on the whole, very long explanations of the works: they are autonomous texts ranging from the anecdote to the portrait and the short story; they may be similar to the cinematographic  arrangement of scenes, besides  the  eighteenth and nineteenth century taste of the historical and custom imagination. In an autobigraphical note published on the cover of one of his monographies, the artist has synthetically declared his preferences as reader: "Franz Borghese reads a lot, everything, but his favourite readings are Voltaire, for whose love he detests Rousseau, and the Three Musketeers by Dumas, which he considers immortal". That is two centuries, one drawn toward the other, that from the tale of action and thought and the  "fiction" by Voltaire (rich of quoted and quoted again irony and narrative schemes of the past), and through the "roman feuilleton", nearly industrially produced by Alexandre Dumas the Father, go to the twentieth century comics and television-tale. With the progressive development of a language modelled on the immediate comprehensibility of what is spoken and sold, at the opposite pole of the specialized languages for skilled and initiated people, so, the discreet fascination of the stereotype asserts gradually itself. Writing proceeds also through interactions with a popular public, however with a bigger frequency avails itself of the reference to this language for a more complicated and specific elaboration behind the apparent simplicity: as it happens indeed in the writing and in the images of Borghese, who (always in the above mentioned autobiographical note) has made explicit some of his preferences also regarding some historical fantastic characters: "Among the most famous characters he has a great regard for Napoleone and Alessandro the Macedonian, however he prefers Frankenstein and the  Count Dracula, before all because they are imaginary." The stereotype reveals itself as the profane question of the mass mythology.

Rome 1999                                                                                                                            Luciano Cabutti

(Franz Borghese - Publishing House Il Tetto - Rome)

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