Biography
"Art is an anthropological journey through imagination."
Franz Chi was born in 1970 in Cittadella, a little town close to Venice, in the heart of the industrious North-East of Italy. Self-taught, he soon approaches the oil-painting, developing pieces close to the surrealist sensibility. Twenty-years old is victim of a road-traffic accident that forced him to use artificial prostheses. The sublimation and the overcoming of those moments lead him to build his first robotic installation of cyberpunk inspiration, using recycled objects assembled together without welds. He graduated in Political Sciences at the University of Padua, with a thesis in sociology on the “Classical Mythology and its interaction with Advertising”. He begins his working-career as marketing-researcher, lecturer and successively Art Director and Copywriter in a small advertising agency with big clients. This last job introduces him to the computer graphics. He participates to some exhibitions in Padua at the “Cattedrale dell'Ex Macello” and, in 2003, he is invited to the exhibition "Erotic Bodly hybridization" at the gallery “Larson Sekanina” in Ferrara that featured the artist Orland as special guest. Meanwhile he becomes freelancer and develops his website (reviewed by several international communities) and he is asked to participate to the French book "WorldWide Designers 2007", including almost 140 international artists, with the technical support of Computer Art Magazine. After two years spent in a large Advertising Agency in Milan as "hidden persuader", he comes back to countryside and where continues to make sculpture and assemblage. In 2011, he discovers the Raku-ceramics and studies modelling and cooking with Matt-Naked technique.
CURIOSITY, THINK, OBSERVATION, DISASSEMBLY, RECONSTRUCTION.
The study of myths, such as the nostalgia for the origins, remains imprinted with imagination, as part of the reconstruction of that era who can resurrect his exceptional creative power: it has a magic value, but a practical intention, aimed at overcoming estrangement of things and the recovery of the direct relationship man/nature that the consumer society removes, fragmenting life in the factuality of everyday life. The myth is then understood as a therapeutic function and policy, aimed to restore historical times. Jean Baudrillard said, "If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth...", and this loss of self- consciousness also leads to the loss of sense of historical time. If in this society the past is quickly shelved and the future never remotely imagined, that's the present, disconnected from the continuity of time, but always present as a constant, seeking its justification in a semi-unknown past, made so far to become a dream, or so close o be confused with the present. This critique of the consumer society of mass finds its expression in the techniques used , i.e., modelling and re-use of materials, altered from the epistemological point of view, their recycling and their reinterpretation in a Duchamp-like style. The artist becomes a "dreamnaut", imaginary modern traveller and anthropologist , whose quest for knowledge is to look at objects from non-canonical angles, from disassembly to figure out how they are made and re-assemble them to recognize their uniqueness and their beauty free from industrial production.
