Franco Tosi's paintings the natural factor, to the same founding extent, is present in a completely different sense. Indeed, the painter's are large canvases of at first glance monochrome intonation that impose themselves in space as installations environmental, in which the silent happenings we gradually discover emerging from the pictorial surface give us the impression of being on the precipice of a boundless and uncontrollable panorama. In these visions there are no recognizable elements, and not even units of measurement are suggested to relate what we look at to a plausible hypothesis, although mysteriously we sense that, be they aerial panoramas or organic tissues observed under a microscope (hypotheses both plausible, it is up to us to decide), we are faced with something consubstantial to our experience of the world and ourselves. Indeed, the paintings that Tosi rightly refers to as "mental landscapes" situate our point of view in a recondite gap between our private infinity, itself mental and biological, and the infinity of creation, which through them becomes available to be explored in both a cosmic and a lenticular sense. At the root of this
inexplicable transdimensional affinity is the natural matrix, which in Tosi's case is inscribed in the DNA of painting. In his creative process, in fact, the traditional technique of oil is hybridized with the introduction of sought-after materials of plant derivation plants, such as Ural pine resin, the dried leaves of Central Park red maples ground into a pigment, the golden secretion of a particular Thai beetle used in cabinetmaking, and other workshop secrets that link his practice back to the technical treatises on painting in vogue in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Entirely contemporary, however, is his approach, which also starts from a void (this time mental) necessary to listen to the resonance inner resonance of the color in his mind, the only predefined element of the work apart from the measurements, and then proceeds with a hand-to-hand with the canvas lying on the ground in which the first layers of material are instinctively deposited, even making use of unconventional tools such as hands or a construction trowel. The phase following this liberating externalization of the suggestions triggered by the sensory evocation of the initial color is a patient work of identifying the details
to be detected, in which the artist emphasizes and indulges the reciprocal reactions of the materials he superimposes and mixes, deciding which suggestions offered by their sometimes unpredictable collisions to include in the epidermal narrative of the work. E it is precisely this inextricable intermingling between the artist's actions and the behaviors of a material that is itself alive and subject to perpetual change that allows his painting to delve into the realm of the imperceptible in order to restore it as an atmosphere integrated in which interior, exterior, physical laws and emotions assume a single visible form.
Emanuela Zanon
