Since the beginning, the research of Franco Guerzoni was up-to-date and full of original ideas, even if in line with the most interesting experiences developing in Italy and abroad. Indeed, considering visual arts, that period was particularly rich and full of innovative solutions on both the conceptual and expressive level.

This project, the fourth donated by the author to MoRE, dates back to a period between 1968 and 1969, when Guerzoni, then in his early twenties and at the end of his education, abandoned the traditional painting technique and started doing researches in the avant-garde, especially around Duchamp.

He was spontaneously attracted by the most important international researches, such as the American Land Art and the Italian Arte Povera. These interests reflect in some of his works, not always realised, such as this project donated to MoRE. The concept behind the project was quite simple: Guerzoni wanted to bring inside the closed space of an art gallery a natural occurrence, the rainbow. The project included, as shown in the sketch, a field sprayer machine in the center of the room. It would have sprayed water, playing with the artificial light effects.

The author, thinking about that installation – also with the collaboration of Luigi Ghirri, friend and companion of many art adventures – took some photographs in the countryside. These study series of water splashes investigated the nature of the rainbow and its visual perception. These conceptual photographs are the only evidence of the project. It remained unrealized due technical difficulties but also because it was more theoretical than realizable. The theme to bring the nature inside the culture was particularly strong in that period; Guerzoni itself thought to produce a black rose, as symbolic synthesis of the two elements.
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]]> http://dspace-unipr.cineca.it/handle/1889/3245]]> In this drawing Franco Guerzoni speculates - with a theoretical exercise nearer to utopia than to a real project - about the possibility of realising flying carpets. On this drawing we can find, together with shapes and images by Guerzoni himself, a poetry written by his friend Adriano Malavasi.
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]]> http://hdl.handle.net/1889/2703]]> The two figures “I remember I have seen a mosque inside the Amun Temple in Luxur” and “Development of the decoration of an Etruscan vase according to a nineteenth-century portrayal” were to be part of a broader and more structured project, centred on the theme of the potential image, a topic very dear to the author. The original project envisaged the presence of a third figure representing a mental image, merely potential, hence rendered in a writing. The conceptual nature of such an image would have not allowed any visual depiction. The presence of a fourth figure, devoted to the utopian possibility of exposing films with the only power of thoughts, was merely a working hypothesis. This work, of a cleary conceptual nature, was therefore to be centered on the theme of the “potential image”. Such topic takes on great importance for both the artist's production and the cultural context in which this project was conceived.
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]]> http://hdl.handle.net/1889/2704]]> The project Stelle e lucciole was conceived between 1969 and the early 1970s and thus represents one of the earliest episodes in the fruitful collaboration between Franco Guerzoni and Luigi Ghirri, which produced such significant results. The idea behind these photographic images was for the two artists and friends to capture the starry sky and the fireflies, which left luminous trails across it, in a single image. Ghirri did in fact take numerous photographs of the scene, but for purely technical reasons, the outcome – the photographs that Guerzoni donated to MoRE – was not what had been intended.
Strictly speaking, therefore, it would not be entirely accurate to say that this project was never realised. Rather, as Guerzoni himself has stated, it can be classified as an unresolved or suspended project that never reached the completion originally envisaged.
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