Giuseppe Francalanza
...in the Side Room
dove dovrebbe stare. Vallo a spiegare.
Devo armarmi per questo di pensieri.
E gli altri corpi, regni lontani e alteri.
– Patrizia Cavalli, Datura
Giuseppe Francalanza is unafraid to lay bare his inner world. He does so through ethereal, often elusive images that hover between figuration and abstraction, in which anthropomorphic and, at times, zoomorphic forms gradually dissolve into fields of color and indeterminate landscapes. Beneath these shifting surfaces lies an unrelenting force, a pulsating energy that emerges as a response to the longing for a place that can never truly be left behind: Sicily, whose light and memory remain inseparable from the gaze of those born there.
All of My Angels Wear a Rag: I The Tuner marks Francalanza’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Conceived specifically for the occasion, the five paintings on view culminate a body of work produced throughout 2026, revealing a decisive shift within the artist’s visual language. The force that has long defined his painterly imagination is no longer an overwhelming presence that arrests transformation; instead, it becomes an irrepressible, life-giving energy that ultimately enables change.
In The Tuner, light, long the defining subject of Francalanza’s practice, acts from within the image, simultaneously constructing and illuminating it. It shapes forms through gesture and color while revealing an ongoing meditation on displacement and the condition of living at a distance from one’s place of origin. The painting establishes the emotional register of the exhibition. Two figures, their silhouettes tenuously held together by delicate threads, are caught in a moment of restrained intimacy, as though witnessed in secret. This gesture recalls the Greek mythological Fates, the three sisters who spun, measured, and ultimately severed the thread of human destiny. In* Fidi ri Sangu*, too, the figures remain bound together by a thread, while branches attempt to obstruct both their release and their emergence from the pictorial surface, a process that begins with the evaporation of light itself.
The act of tuning, suggested by the exhibition’s title, thus becomes a metaphor for Francalanza’s artistic and personal maturation. It unfolds through the urgent desire to surrender to the presence of another, to accept its transformative force, and to discover, through this bond, a long-awaited moment of grace. The five works, which anticipate the second chapter of the project, All of My Angels Wear a Rag: II The Witness, later presented in Nanjing, China, evoke states of transition and attempted transformation. Yet an obstinate earthly resistance continually confines metamorphosis within the limits of the human condition. Throughout the paintings, ropes, pliers, and grasping hands emerge as counterforces to dissolution and change, imposing boundaries upon bodies that seem otherwise destined to dissolve into light.
In Speaking of Resurrection to Those Who Mourn, several figures cling to one another upon a snowy landscape, trapped in the act of generating a fragile hearth that radiates from the cold metal jaws of a pair of pliers. The intensity of this heat converges towards a single center, simultaneously offering refuge and obstructing passage.
Ascùpa, the only work in the exhibition from which the human figure disappears entirely, evokes a tool used to sweep away accumulated layers, uncertainty, and residue, restoring both formal and emotional order. Executed on Kahari paper, a support whose porous surface allows oil pigments to settle deeply within its fibers, the work also marks an important formal experiment within Francalanza’s practice. The technique closely approximates the depth and materiality of painting on canvas while granting the artist greater freedom to move organically between drawing and painting, further underscoring the unified and evolutionary trajectory that defines his most recent body of work.
– Chiara Nuzzi