(arrived at the third edition)

A remarkable book, this one of Franco Abbina, “Storie e Leggende che non sono mai state”; a book that can be a talisman of wisdom for the happiness of the reader, as the editorial opening notes suggest. Tender and sharp, kind and irreverent: poetic in the highest sense of the term; namely attractive, paying attention to the reading of the interstices between one story and another, as well as to the understanding weft of the tapestry; the sense of a life that “fishes dreams” through writing and unravels memories and desires by looking at the sky, as does the character of the last stories, François (a sort of heteronym of the author, evidently), through small pieces of tinted glass.

The book is divided into two (no, three) parts: the first one, eponymous, which gives the title to the whole, and the second one, the vastest one, dedicated to representation of multiple and diverse types of human beings, as the title let us know “Certain people a bit like this”. A whole accompanied of a well-stocked carousel of “images” is subject to different readings, or better said, it predisposes us to different angles by the clever organization of the author, at least as much as the structural parts are diverse in angles.

It is therefore not just an “ironic reflection on human defects”, as poetess Alda Merini had already defined previously, where she did not distinguish between contents and icons of the text and mainly focused on the preposterous aspect of figures and characters within it. Today it can be added the following: considering both contents and icons, it can be said, for example, that it reveals itself blessed with multis luminibus as well as ingenii, and also multae tamen artis; that this happens by looking both at what is specifically said in the texts, “tales and legends”, and what is communicated through the images from time to time, enclosed and embedded in the text itself; but also even looking at what is not said (or does not want to say).

For example, when turning over the pages of the book, which the author has bestowed upon me, I am impressed with the fact that at least three texts amongst the original book have been removed “Looking for an identity”, “Neighbourhood love” and “The victim”. For the first one a replacement suggests itself immediately; a text with an emblematic title “Sentimental coherence”; a search for an identity which paradoxically develops on the sharp edge of transgression: as to say that existence (ex-sistere, namely to be instant by instant) creates its own spaces of freedom outside any law or given form.

But, who is the author? Franco (François?) Abbina is a lot of things together, an old globetrotter of the culture with a Moustaki style pirate resemblance: theatre and cinema actor, a cultivator of music, painter and writer, or even an entrepreneur. A grand “amateur” in the most etymological sense of the term; one who enjoys doing, testing himself.

The work we are talking about is narrative and visual at the same time, which has a fulminant and essential writing, and this is its most important merit.

A heterogeneous book with a satura lanx style, term used by the Latin; namely, “rich and succulent food” whereby the mix of gravies and stews brings us unpredictable flavours and attractive delicatessens, although not without a pinch of sourness, corrosive irreverence. Stories and images which in fact cross and contaminate each other within surprising mixtures from what the title itself says; that is to say that the récit develops along the thread of things “that have never been”.

This is to say that they live and meet, first and second part, blessed with their own and self-governing lives, except from claiming the urgency of a global, non-rhapsodic look: no comments or lecturing from one another; they have the strength of being themselves, offering themselves without feeling ashamed for what they are; fantastic tributes by their existence; spaces of desire; “identity search” through borrowed lives, imagined lives. With existence, daily life, perpetuated, like a multicolour spectacle structured by a wise guide made through his strokes, which reminds us once again of the sharp and poisonous penmanship of Grosz, the expressionism of Viani, the archaic and grotesque handwriting of Antony Witt and the slightly naïve stroke of Gino Meloni let us not forget the happy and surrealistic atmospheres of some of Garcia Lorca’s drawings. All of that with a surplus of an enchanting flavour within the amalgam.

Vincenzo Guarracino

Franco Abbina amongst words and colours.

How are Franco Abbina´s images born, lunar and apparently disordered world of his stories and legends in paper or fabric? “They have never been”, rightly so, he notes it in the title of the anthology of images and in the apologue himself, published by Gangemi Editore in Rome, although we are not completely sure. We realized that he gives away a joke of effect; that his statements contain a sort of underestimation which rhetorically diminishes in order to ask for confirmation; positioning by those who enter his texts or paintings. Once immerse in the set of the artis-author´s imagination, his characters have in effect become alive through his words and gained blood through the colors, starting a journey which reaches the reader-espectator with surprising effectiveness and plausibility making them think and reflect about himself and the social dynamics around him. It is understood, through the titles, that these dynamics are originated from life, from the reality that Abbina has seen and experienced before creating them and let them dwell in his imagination, before shaping them in the paper or fabric: “The visit of the great lover”, “Drunk lover”, “Drunk with tears”, “The pub of the lost lovers”, “Refused charity”, “A marriage proposal” up to the most sulfuric sarcasm of “The last funeral; mine” and “Reading of the will of Franco Abbina”.

It is clear that what the author aims for on paper, through humans taken out of the ordinary life, often within a couple´s relationship (in such a way that we could talk in Freud´s terms as “family romance”) is the definition of a model of humanity in which he puts himself naked in relation to others thus revealing with warmth vices and defects which the author´s smile refines and understands. “In search of identity” is the title of an emblematic text which talks about a guy who strives all his life to be like others (such as Humphrey Bogart, Peter O´Tool, Yul Brinner, Sean Connery) and at the end of it he sadly realizes that he has not even been able to be like himself. On the fabric, the same men are placed on a strong stroke, on a sharp writing, without distractions, and in clear patina, without bitting the bush; it gives up any mediation of criticism allowing to be perceived in its message already explicit in what the title suggests.

Both the apologues and the paintings alike give life to a varied and multicolor “show” on the strokes; apologues which every now and then reminds us of certain little proses, satirical an poisonous like those of Landolfi and Manganelli (stories of Centuria, 1979); paintings that reminds us every now and then of Grosz´s venomous, sharp pen, Viani´s expressionism, certain archaic and grotesque writing of Antony de Witt of the stroke, a little naive, of Gino Meloni, all with the benefit in the amalgam of well recognized peculiarity of expression.

Vincenzo Guarracino