Borgo Museo | Sculture 1976 – 2004
Biography
Franco Cilia was born in 1940 in Sicily, in Ragusa. His research since the 1960s deals with the shattering of the ego and the relationship of the human being with his immaterial other, looking for what moves behind the visible, exploring the possibilities of symbiosis between informal and figurative on a linguistic level. Thus his sculpture attempts to reveal the anthropomorphic mystery of the stones of the Hyblean land, as a deep and underground expression of the Sicilian soul. Cilia’s art continues to evolve and in the 80s it finds international acclaim, from Madrid to Paris, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Istanbul, São Paulo of Brazil, Mexico City, etc… Her research moves between intimate and social, psychic and cosmic, while the contemporary use of different registers highlights a constant restlessness that prevents the fixation of his art in repetitive modules, in strong and ideological contrast with art as decoration or pure experimentalism: art for Cilia it is an instrument of knowledge. His works are now present in public museums and private collections all over the world. In the meantime, the artist has also dedicated himself to writing, ranging from fiction to theatre.
Philosophy
Franco Cilia’s art develops both in painting and in sculpture. In the first period of his production he deals with themes mainly related to the labyrinths of the psyche. In painting, his research is aimed at resolving the figure into chromatic and dynamic elements; in many of his works the sky becomes the protagonist together with his dynamisms of light, up to the fading of forms and the prevalence of pure color. With sculpture, on the other hand, he tries to discover the essence of reality, of his land, of Sicily. The artist is linked to his land both physically and idealistically, he is linked to the stones that he carves in a natural way and sometimes paints. Looking at a sculpture or rather a “stone” of Cilia is a bit like seeing the face of a Sicilian farmer: warm and open in relationships with others but that brings with it the fatigue of living. Cilia’s may seem a ruthless realism, but in reality it is only truthful, and as such, it does not close the discourse on human hope, but opens it. As the artist himself states, “the world is what it is and hiding it from us is useless”.
Artwork in Castagno
One of the two sculptures by Franco Cilia present in Castagno is the Sasso di Ragusa. For some time, the critic Tommaso Paloscia had found in the artist’s production a unique originality and creativity in both painting and sculpture. And it is in the latter that Cilia implements a particular technique that he calls double face, transforming a double life into his “stones”, whereby a satanic grin on one side corresponds to a captivating smile on the other. The work hosted in Castagno is very dear to many Ragusans: for a few months it was in the center of Piazza Libertà in Ragusa but, due to the cultural neglect of some subjects, it took off towards Tuscany. Franco Cilia found the fathers of his masks in the stones of Ragusa and interpreted them in their carnal weight, color, love and blood. And he has managed to enliven the bare stone, to accentuate the plasticity and depth of these rocks, sometimes – but not in this case – with rapid strokes of color. This “stone” instead appears very natural, it is not painted, and integrates perfectly into the context, among the stone houses of the village: it hides among the leaves of a bush, above the wall of a house, in the central square, and it seems like hiding to surprise, and maybe even scare a little, with that strange expression, that sad smile of a tragicomic spirit, because life is tragic and comical, the passer-by still unaware of its presence.
The Borgo Museum has three “stones” by Franco Cilia, two sculptures located in the town (including this one entitled Sasso di Ragusa) and a smaller one on the wall of Casa Paloscia. Find out more by reading the factsheet on Sasso antropomorfo and the one on Antropomorfico.