M.F. is the result of a history that breathed the atmosphere of Europe drenched in the past, its museums and ancient works.
She has an exceptional sensitivity to portraits with a sinewy Nordic style almost like Dürer’s, especially with India inks where the stroke becomes the protagonist and stands out from the softness of the drawing, becoming an incisive and satisfied sign.
Her b/w stories reflect a love for the human body interpreted as an architectural construction in a prospective base of flat surfaces and volumes, and at the same time, that treads a dreamlike dimension, transfigured in a space between the ancestral and the surreal.
Melanie Francesca’s talent consists in combining in her artworks, with extraordinary technical skills, her form of prayer to the universe in celebrating the spirit of nature and the glory of the human being. In a technological and materialistic age like ours, it is a message of freedom, hope and indisputable modernity.
MINISTER OF CULTURE NOW OF TOLERANCE,
HIS HIGNESS
NAHYAN BIN MUBARACK AL NAHYAN
Multifaceted and versatile artist, Melanie Francesca, with various international exhibitions, over thirteen active books and participation in well-known television programs, ranges from art to writing, maintaining her image as a model and famous TV personality. In her artistic activity she marries with considerable talent the stylistic features of drawing and engraving, the memory of Nordic masters such Dürer, with the power of modernity, represented by lightboxes and “experiential” art.
In her works we find attention to a united humankind, whose multiculturalism, experienced in first person by the artist who has been living and exhibiting in the United Arab Emirates for years, far from being an obstacle, becomes one of the major points of strength. Reflecting on a common past, Melanie Francesca creates an all-encompassing artistic experience for the observer, providing them with the tools to fully immerse themselves in a journey beyond defined space and time. History and traditions revive, both in artistic works and in literary ones, thanks to a young and daring style capable of bridging the gap between the eras. A style that derives, perhaps, from the life experience of the artist, a Western woman, in a country permeated by a secular culture, but still absolutely alive.
Almost a mythological Pandora, Melanie Francesca reminds us that contrasts, chiaroscuro and contradictions are part of the life of each of us, that beauty shines further emerging from the darkness and that in all this lies the strength and power of the human gendre. The artist has the courage to reflect clearly on life and, not without a hint of shrewd irony, to open a window to all of us on these meditations, overcoming fears and prejudices, letting to be carried away by what she feels and wishes to share as an expression of her soul.
From books, to poems, to works, the art of Melanie Francesca is a pressing invitation to enjoy the experience and the thousand facets and shades that the world, today as in the past, can offer us.
Professor Francesco Alberoni
It happened to me one day, sitting at a table in a Milanese restaurant, to observe Melanie Francesca into her drawing experience. We were chatting and she, with absolute naturalness, began to draw a man’s hand on the tablecloth. Without ceasing to tell what she was telling, as if for her at that moment saying and doing were complementary and inseparable activities, as if the mark of the ballpoint pen on the whiteness of the cloth tablecloth was the only way to give an account of an argument in action, Melanie made a hand – the most difficult of the forms for an artist’s test – with measured elegance and with the manner, and the confident air of the pictorial academy of yesteryear.
I remembered this episode when I saw The Box, the pictorial and graphic work by Melanie Francesca which has already had a first, important installation in Dubai in the last artistic season.
The hands, in fact, plastically depicted, recur several times on the sides of which the Box is composed, often intertwined with each other to form new sinuous figures, such as a tree for example. Next to the hands there is much more. There are numerous references to classicism, ancient or revisited, arranged in just hinted at stage scenes, one set seamlessly into the other. Monks and gladiators, children and horses, women and mannequins, skulls, animals, flowers, divinities; in the scenic space made available by very light but very present architectural signs, the intense visual suggestions that the artist gracefully and confidently impose on the viewer run after each other.
Over all, however, dominates a superb, disturbing female figure. Born, one could say, from the intertwining of the most diverse forms, just as in certain Art Nouveau symbolism, the protagonist of the Box, a novel Leda who instead of the swan ‘duets’ with the iguana and bees, plays the role of scenic center of gravity between the different ages of life, between birth and death.
I don’t know if with this work, Melanie Francesca also wants to allude to the relationship between the deep female identity and its external forms, what I think we can say is that in the characters of this work there is certainly the character of its author.
ANTONIO RICCARDI, SEM EDIZIONI editorial director, former Mondadori editorial director