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Franco Fontana - Landscape, 1978

Franco Fontana's 1978 photograph "Landscape" depicts a landscape composed of fields of varying sizes and colors with a tree in the center. Fontana aimed to capture the invisible foundations of landscapes by isolating and abstracting their essential visual elements through an intensification of color and contrast. He is particularly known for his landscapes of his homeland depicted as successions of multicolored stripes. "Landscape" exemplifies Fontana's technique of reducing topographical elements to layered horizontal bands heightened by color contrasts to extract the landscape's essence.

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89 views3 pages

Franco Fontana - Landscape, 1978

Franco Fontana's 1978 photograph "Landscape" depicts a landscape composed of fields of varying sizes and colors with a tree in the center. Fontana aimed to capture the invisible foundations of landscapes by isolating and abstracting their essential visual elements through an intensification of color and contrast. He is particularly known for his landscapes of his homeland depicted as successions of multicolored stripes. "Landscape" exemplifies Fontana's technique of reducing topographical elements to layered horizontal bands heightened by color contrasts to extract the landscape's essence.

Uploaded by

madalina sinoae
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Franco Fontana– Landscape, 1978

Working primarily with a 35mm camera where his studio is


the world, Fontana pursues his own view of making the
invisible visible through art.
The great artist explained in an interview that, ‘The invisible
is our foundation. Think of a tree: it lives with the help of its
roots, which you cannot see. That is the kind of invisible
reality that I want to capture and to remove everything that is
unnecessary.'But it is for the landscapes of his homeland that
he is the most well-known, thanks to his unique and
recognizable style of “photographic line”, his incredible sense
of composition, his skillful geometric construction of the
frame, and wonderful selection of colours. Mountains, sea,
coast, hills and fields appear as a succession of multicoloured
stripes, sometimes contrasting, sometimes in a single scheme.

Fotografia intitulată Landscape este un peisaj cuprins din


mai multe câmpuri diferite ca marime și culoare, iar în mijloc
se află un copac.
Fontana’s attempts to isolate, in space and time, the abstracted
details of the Italian landscape can be seen in this image in
which the topographical elements are reduced through an
intensification of colour to layered horizontal bands. This
reductive approach extracts only the essential elements
heightened by the colours and contrasts that are increased by
overexposing the film. The omission of the horizon, the tight
cropping of the components that, whether vertical or
horizontal, are visually squeezed into the frame adding to the
tension, has much in common with Grant Mudford or the
work of objective photographers such as Robert Petschow,
Walker Evans or Imogen Cunningham. ‘Landscape’ is a
typical image from Fontana in which the intense colours
constantly roll into one other, occasionally crashing up against
an element that throws the eye into recognition of the natural
representation and reveals his interest in the violence of the
image.
Actually, there is a humanisation of the landscape, a
transformation that takes place through colour, Fontana’s true
subject. Through his choices of colour juxtapositions, Fontana
gives meaning to his photography and makes it vital. He sets
out on a creative path that breaks the rules, often bringing out
previously unknown aspects of reality, whose interpretive
solutions are always very highly coloured, like the diverse
situation and moods of life
Starting from a tangible reality he abstracts by excluding all
unnecessary elements. Through his technique he has
developed a personal language that unfolds the familiar
landscapes and the unknown expanses so that the signs, the
space, the shape and the colour become the only elements of
the image.

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