The exhibition Francesca Galliani INCROLLABILE (UNWEVAERING) just closed at VisionQuesT 4rosso in Genova. We wished anyway to share her work with you.
After more than twenty years, these unique photographs have emerged from Francesca Galliani’s archives (photographs that Galliani printed in analogue and selenium and sepia toned herself); the unchanged tension given by the combination of faces and bodies, – only apparently unambiguous in genre – is expressed by the intertwining of seduction, tenderness, introspection, discouragement, defiance and triumph.
In the depiction of people. as in all her work, Galliani’s portraits “exude a longing for emotions and an attempt to capture what is most fleeting: the process of becoming. In this perspective, the artist and her subjects evolve together. The transitory nature of place provides a backdrop for the more psychologically probing and difficult metamorphosis of personal identity. Galliani focuses her artfully compassionate lens on transgender men and women who live on the margins of traditional categories by which we define society and roles within it. Often gorgeous by any measure of conventional beauty, each portrait has a formal power achieved through pose, lighting, and the artist’s masterful experimentation with the photographic printing process. But words or images that float within their portrait settings, like the meaning-laden props in a domestic scene by Vermeer, sometimes hint at the more tragic aspects of life experience: “stop misery,” “trash,” “fight back,” smash gay oppression.”
