Franco Fontana: A Life in Color: Online Retrospective

Franco Fontana, Los Angeles 'e', 1991
Franco Fontana, Los Angeles 'e', 1991
"SOMETIMES I FIND A LANDSCAPE SO IRRESISTIBLE THAT I FORGET EVERYTHING ELSE ... I BECOME THE LANDSCAPE AND THE LANDSCAPE BECOMES ME. I LIVE IT. I ALLOW THE LANDSCAPE TO FILL MY VOID, TO FILL ME WITH HAPPINESS AND JUST THEN I SHOOT."

The Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present the Online Retrospective "Franco Fontana: A Life in Color." Looking back at more than 60 years of photography, we honor one of the great 20th century color photographers as he celebrates his 90th birthday. 

 

Franco Fontana is especially interested in the interplay of colors. His early innovations in color photography in the 1960s were stylistically disruptive. According to art critic Giuliana Scimé, Fontana "destroyed all the structures, practices, and technical choices within the Italian tradition." Fontana uses 35mm cameras and deploys distant viewpoints with telephoto lenses to flatten contours in a landscape of crops and fields into bands of intense, saturated colour. Of his use of colour in his 2019 retrospective exhibition Sintesi ('Synthesis') at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive, curator Diana Baldon observed:

 

His bold geometric compositions are characterized by shimmering colors, level perspectives and a geometric-formalist and minimal language...By adopting this approach during the 1960s, Fontana injected a new vitality into the field of creative color photography for then multicolor was not in fashion in art photography...The way Fontana shoots, dematerialises the objects photographed, which loose three-dimensionality and realism to become part of an abstract drawing.

Aside from the rural landscape Fontana has applied his graphic sensibility to other subjects: city architecture, portraiture, fashion, still-life and the nude.

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