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Tanzinika SchwartzschloffFranco Meloni’s solo exhibition was on view at Broadway Gallery in January.
Franco Meloni, Senza Titolo. Courtesy of the Artist.
The recent solo exhibition of the Sardinian “raw” outsider artist, Franco Meloni, innovatively curated by Tchera Niyego, was an overwhelming success. A young self-taught artist from Sardinia, Italy, Meloni’s compositions exude a creative sense of the wild and abandon associated with the terrestrial freedom and radiant sunlight of his Mediterranean island home. First discovered by the internationally renowned naïve painter, Franco Corrado Pau, who helped Meloni understand his own work and present it to the public, Meloni has finally emerged in the New York art scene, where he has been welcomed and embraced with open arms. Expressive and fantastical, the innovative imagery of this autodidact reveals the hidden side of his subjects’ personalities. Fascinated by imperfection, Meloni attempts to incorporate incongruities and irregularity into his warm folksy mis-en-scene portraits. In fact, Meloni proclaims, “Irregularity is the expression of errors. I think that inside them there is the truth.”One such portrait depicts a woman with an aquamarine face, clutching a silver-flecked fish in her teeth, bordered by colorful striped paneling of lime green and squash yellow. Encompassed by the neon pink of the negative space, she is engulfed in a space that is not of this world. The splatters of crimson hue paint slashing across her facial features, evokes a sensation of violence and death, an impression compounded by the fish flopping cold and lifeless in her mouth. Such imagery cannot be explained, except in the Surrealist terms of Jungian psychology and shamanistic ritual. In fact, such animated scenes expose the artist’s fascination with dreamlike states. Painting these startling, yet jovial images directly from his dreams, these thought-provoking images evince a sense of life, passion, and ultimately death.
