About the artist

"The shape of a sculpture forms in the silence of a dream, it expands in the magical space that does not have well defined boundaries, but the cover of darkness. Later, the dream fits into reality, taking on the concreteness of a rationally planned object, with precise dimensions, weight and volume. Colour melts into the material – concrete – that turns into a shape and becomes part of the whole, underlining or toning down expressive solutions.

The process of shaping a sculpture seems to proceed almost in silence; it is a timeless situation, despite the deafening noise of the cutting mechanic tools or the chisel and hammer. The thin dust that shrouds the gestures of work is like a protective filter, it shelters from the outside world. Once complete, the sculpture will stand on its own, independent. It will live its own life like children live their own, it will survive its parent. It should mark a moment in time, however short, more real than the inborn human desire to be saved from oblivion."

Franco Monti, Ibiza 2004

“Franco Monti is an enigmatic artist, a sculptor we could almost call clandestine. He has never been linked to art groups, schools or artistic tendencies on the rise; nor has he wasted his time on that kind of artistic syncretism where works of contemporary art are made to resemble the constructive and imaginative models put into play by the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. Monti has the gaze of the anthropologist, of a scientist. His longstanding familiarity with the ethnic identities and cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa has led him to the conclusion that art is mostly form. Yet for Monti, the more profound meanings of such form must be sought out within the material and intellectual culture it draws its life from. Thus forms are translated into images or signs, into tangible presences that always respond to an intentional pattern – the artist’s own motivations – in debate with tricky questions of artistic autonomy, a debate able to translate these forms into art.”*

*Extract from the book “Steles of Colour. The sculpture of Franco Monti” J.F. Yvars, Ed Ambit, Barcelona 2005. English edition.

Video of some of the artworks of Franco Monti filmed in his atelier. It contains a short of the exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art of Ibiza in l'Hospitalet, Ibiza 2006. Copyright Manfred & Margitta Ballheimer.