Franco Fontana Colore pays tribute to the Italia master of colour’s seven decades-long career with a display of more than 120 large format works. 

Born in the historic town of Modena in 1933, Fontana has left his mark in the history of photography by dedicating his entire practice to colour, at a time when this was a much frowned upon medium. Snubbed by both photographers and institutions, colour was in fact considered the domain of advertising and family souvenirs, belonging either to a purely commercial or an amateur world; something from which any serious artistic production should distance itself.

Fontana embraced his radical choice from the late 50s, never even considering shooting black and white apart from a single roll of film, specifically commissioned in 1979 by Ralph Gibson for his coral project Contact: theory.

Although Fontana has explored many subjects, in his career, it can be argued that the true subject of each of his compositions is colour itself. The different objects that shape the colours are just a pretext, a convenience. Colour is the undisputed protagonist.

Fontana’s language was already clearly formed from his early works and has remained coherent for the following decades: the extrapolation of objects which, thanks to unpredictable cuts, lose their reference to the object they depict, his uncompromising attention to the balance of the composition, the rigid division of the visual field; the search for geometries and lines-play, the deceptive use of perspective and the flattening of the depth of field. The latter was a happy accident, the consequence of a technical issue, which later became a distinctive feature: Franco owned only a 50-millimetre lens that didn't allow him to select distant details; he, therefore, could only frame a large portion of the visual field and later, during printing, enlarge and crop the part that interested him. This operation became part of his daily vocabulary, "delete to elect".

Taking a photo is like framing a portion of our field of vision, extrapolating a segment of the reality in front of us. This operation is made radical by his selecting and merging elements different from those our brain would automatically aggregate. Where a natural line would lead us to divide the image, Fontana ignores it, and cuts elsewhere, subverting the natural couplings and the hierarchy of the objects. 

As he says, he practises violence onto reality, re-organising and regrouping the details of our visual field, subverting their relationships: it is as if he detached the syllables which previously formed one word and attached some to the previous word, and others to the following one. In reality, we see a building standing out against the sky, but through his lens, that fragment of wall no longer belongs to the building, it creates a new element with that other piece stolen from the sky and that other fragment stolen from the street. Fontana re-educates our eye, and somehow everything makes much more sense his way.

Catalogue published by Skira, with the essay ‘Frammenti’ by Caterina Mestrovich