I would place Francesco Galletta’s art in a branch of the folk primitive art, with its country-style graphics reminiscent of the 50s, where you can find nostalgic visions of farms, colonial houses, stables, small towns, churches, rural landscapes, cars, trucks, ships, musical bands, processions, birds, dogs, cats, fishes.
Francesco grew up in Sicily, a region bound to its traditions. The rural influence is clear in his illustrations, deriving from the suggestive landscape where the Artist found his inspiration, especially during childhood, and shows his predilection for a simpler age, a far away past that gives a nostalgic feeling to people.
It seems like he wants to give to those who see his art the joy of seeing the old family car, the track their grandfather used, or the old abandoned ship on the shore, escaping from the worries of today’s reality to spend some time in the sweet, kind old times.
His paintings show simple shapes, vivid colors, lively subjects that are worth remembering.
He paints intense and detailed landscapes of popular art, the sea, playgrounds, princes and princesses, knights, but most of all, the things that his female family members loved.
His approach to painting is spontaneous and influenced by the natural immediacy of the rural naïf art.
His paintings are almost always inspired by his imagination, shadows are irregular, most of the time even absent.
Francesco is a self-taught painter that tells stories, symbols that are memories of a past world we need to remember in this fast-changing modern world.
In a certain sense, his goal is to create a connection to his native land, that is so full of stories, passing down a feeling of joy, passion and lightness.
His figures possess strength, with their strong lines and curvy shapes, with something unstoppable in the explosion of his colors. The universe of his imagination is fertile, enlightened, equal, a place where every situation was transformed into an eternal moment.
In his extravagant works on big and small canvases there is a great energy, and they are strongly dominated by color.
His balance between design, lines and color is a reflection of his graphic project.
Through his canvases full of memories, where he paints all his visions and impressions, he tells us the story of his land.
Maria Grazia Todaro, May 2016 – Art director of “QueenArtStudio Gallery” – Padova
Francesco Galletta is an artist who taught himself wanted to engage, at an early age, and almost without being aware, at first on a personal research within a reality transformed by color, from the design of forms, from the blend of realism and abstraction. He purposely is iun solitary artist, little interested in attending groups, or to join the movement. Intentionally beyond fashion, intentionally focused on his pictorial world in which reality is described with strokes often. Realism and abstraction, sharp forms and shapes just mentioned, figures drawn carefully and figure just sketched, color spots and empty spaces, drawing and painting, to coexist in dialogue with the viewer.
Galletta is an attractive painter because of this multiplicity of sign and inspiration for his art to compose and decompose the figures and objects, for the energy that his works express, now marked by acute sweetness, now by strong contrasts of color, now by light and dark, now from charcoal strokes and paint strokes read, between red, yellow, orange, blue and black of particular enchantment. His works are the result of an original spirit, an inventor free and secluded that manages to recreate the world of us all, the landscapes and the memories of our childhood, places, shapes, gestures that we know, but transfigured and enticing. In his work is a storyteller who uses signs, shapes, colors, which, at first in his mental planet, moved onto the canvas, on the table, on the carton, on the sheet to tell his own being and your own research. >>
Massimo ZAVOLI- EXPOART Magazine, may 2016
The artists describes himself
«Imagining the painting or the drawing was natural for me since I was little; I’m continuously inspired by what I see. Sometimes all it takes to “build” a painting is looking at a color, a line, a shadow.
I’ve always thought that my real task, the very essence of it, is the elaboration and the execution of the painting, with his references to real life and to the feelings that it manages to create in the viewer. A representation of situations, moments “frozen”, apparently common but at the same time permeated by a dreamy look, so that in the end the scene looks both real and false at the same time. But the viewer is captivated by that scene, and travels with his own fantasy in that image.
I do not think that the paining is finished when I stop painting. On the contrary, it is at the end of its creation that it is truly born and starts living thanks to the emotions and the suggestions that arise in the viewer. Art truly lives if it manage to start an intimate conversation, delicate and vague, with those who knows how to look at, recognize and read it. The value of a piece of art for me do not reside in its price, but in the tribute of sensitivity and reflection that it can give to the watcher; this is the purpose of art, his usefulness, his richness.»
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«At the beginning and at the end of the day I look at the work I’ve done previously, at both the finished and unfinished paintings; I look at them as if they are not my “creatures”. If they captivate me, I feel deep serenity and fulfillment.»
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«A piece of art is something that stimulates our senses: it does not possess a smell, but it envelops us; it does not have sound, but it talks to us; it does not have a taste, but we savour it; it does not possess eyes, but it looks at us and it appeals us. A piece of art is that something that can attract you, that can convey an emotion, a feeling. I’m happy when someone watching my art says that he is “captivated” by it, and that every time he looks at it, it stares back, transporting him in his dreamy world.»
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«The finished painting or drawing is an unique fragment of life, an original and unique experience frozen in time forever, but that renews itself in front of the one who watches. My works are furniture, and so they are purchased, but at the same time they make you think, dream, recalling fragments of life and memories.»
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«In my art my Sicily is always present, the Sicily of religious processions, full of light and colours, the Arabian Sicily, the one that fishes, of dolls and storytellers.»
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«I’m only apparently painting in the traditional way; in reality, I use a pencil or a charcoal when I paint, to define parts of the painting, I scratch the colour, outline the brush strokes removing parts of them, I trace lines and leave empty spaces to both highlight a graphic element and to let others fill the paining with their imaginary colours.»