Steles of colour: the sculpture of Franco Monti

Franco Monti is an enigmatic artist, a scultor we could almost call clandestine. He has never been linked to art groups, schools or artistic tendencies on the rise; nor has he wasted his time on that kind of artistic syncretism where works of contemporany art are made to resemble the constructive and imaginative models put into play by the historical avant-gardes of the earley twentieth century. Monti has the gaze of an anthrpologist, of a scientist. His longstanding familiarity with the ethnic identities and cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa has led him to the conclusion that art is mostly form. Yet for Monti, the more profound meanings of such form must be sought out within the material and intellectual culture it draws its life from. Thus forms are translated into images or signs, into tangible presences that always respond to an intentional pattern -the artist´s own motivations- in debate with tricky questions of artistic autonomy, a debate able to translate these forms into art.( J. F. Yvars)