Franco Marrocco was born in Rocca d’Evandro, Campania in 1956. Having studied at the arts college in Cassino and the Academy of Fine Arts in Frosinone, Marrocco’s early works were characterised by an expressionist aesthetic serving an existentialist realist approach. His more mature production, while retaining some of this initial ardour, would embrace a more timeless and reflective quality.
The combination of light and space has been a defining element of Marrocco’s pictorial research since the 1970s. Works of this kind were exhibited at leading shows that decade, such as at the Cassino Centre for Cultural Services (1978) and the Mazzacurati Award in Teramo (1979). An awareness of the intrinsic relationship between artistic, social and political renewal came to fruition through new experiments: the depicted object was deconstructed and put back together again in a quasi-architectural fashion. The canvas provided the backdrop for the portrayal of a dismantled and then reassembled figure, with the memory of its previous life still vivid. Where light offered freedom, colour imposed itself as a fertile power, the figure remaining but a mnemonic impression.
In the latter half of the 1980s, text and composition merged into all-encompassing depiction. At the end of the 1990s, the author’s quest for meaning saw him immerse himself in the primordial magma of the telluric depths, in which light appeared consumed by darkness and the abyss manifested itself as an inscrutable, visceral entity (Corpo a corpo, 1999), a chilling interstellar darkness (Velato, 1999), an ancestral mythological mystery (La palpebra del ciclope, 1997) and a fathomless underworld (Caverna, 1999).
Attaching greater importance to colour, Marrocco would settle on tones he alluded to briefly in previous works, as portrayed in the geometrical squares of his Alito (1999). His next phase would express a higher tension with a liquid range of ocean and ethereal blues, so light as to be almost transparent.
Marrocco is a professor of painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.
