Augustenborg Project has invited Italian painter Francesco Pirazzi for the art space’s inaugural solo exhibition titled Nobody’s Dream with a selection of over 20 works created between 2018 and 2020. Inspired by the mystery of light, Francesco’s works evoke a silence, mystery, presence and absence in which the precious, fleeting, fascinating and even indecipherable are captured. For Pirazzi, light is both universal and personal, “…something that dresses everything and everyone, but sometimes also nothing and nobody.” But equally, light can cause an abstraction or an experience that seems, as he puts it, “truer than truth.” In acutely observing the world, Pirazzi attempts to get lost, dream and hide—in other words, to float intangibly and be a pair of eyes observing without disrupting his subjects or the light. Painting is an open process of discovery and artistic research for him, for exploring direct experiences of reality and sensations of light.
I can’t remember falling asleep
But I do remember we were together and all of a sudden I was elsewhere.
I had to travel to other places.
I waited for everyone to leave and for there to be silence.
I left as soon as the sun went down and everything turned a little bluer
I saw the walls of the houses change their clothes, and the road in front of me lighting up to show me the way;
I saw the benches that become uncomfortable when you kiss, or when you fight;
and the burning sky, while a car without passengers entered the belly of the night;
then I saw a sleeping tree, so delicate to look like a deer. And just like a deer it
would have run away if I made a noise.
if I could just be a pair of eyes I could go anywhere, without the burden of this bulky man
presence of mine.
No risking to break the fragile moments of beauty, but gazing at them, in quiet.
Dawn came and everything turned bluer, again.
Time to go back home.
I came back because I missed you
I came back to try tell you all the wonders
I’m home, I hear your voice, but I can’t remember falling asleep.
– Francesco Pirazzi
Francesco Pirazzi was born in Alatri, Italy in 1994. In 2018, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence, at the Painting School of the Master Adriano Bimbi. Francesco and the artist group AULA 23 have participated in numerous exhibitions and residency projects in Italy and Brazil. Francesco’s work has been shown at Castello di Grotti (Sicily), Galeria d’arte Nonato Oliveira (Brazil), Biblioteca Municipale in Esperantina (Brazil), Palazzo della Cultura (Stazzema), Palazzo Giorgi (Poppi), Lyceum Club Internazionale (Florence), Nuovo Teatro delle Commedie (Livorno), Museo Civico Archeologico (Fiesole), Francesco lives and works in Florence.