Fuencisla Francés, destroy to create

Segovia,

Fuencisla Francés was born eighty years ago in Segovia, but comes from a Valencian family of artists that included Plácido Francés and Emilio Sala and has resided in that city since his youth, where he would set up his workshop in an old shoe factory. His initial production was based on figurative painting, gradually evolving towards collage and installations: in the latter, and in his sculptures, he has given great importance to paper, using it in different weights and textures.

These installations usually adapt to the spaces where each of their exhibitions is presented, so that we can practically speak of variations on an initial model, but the particularity of these creations lies in their work process: once these works are designed and colored, the breaks it down to generate new ones from its fragments; Its procedures are based on reconstruction, on the discovery of energy in what was previously destroyed. These types of pieces have aroused ambivalent sensations: there are those who find echoes of the original Big Bang; others, references to forests and gardens that convey, above all, stillness and rest.

Within the framework of a new exhibition program at the Esteban Vicente Museum in Segovia, which is titled “Women artists in contemporary Spain” and which will continue for the next four seasons, until January 19, 2025 we can visit there “Fuencisla Francés: Processes , rhythms and vibrations”, a review, curated by Margarita de Aizpuru, of her investigations with fragments of paper, canvas and painted wood: with them she generates proposals two-dimensional and three-dimensional that tend to incorporate rhythms and vibrations, sound echoes.

In the case of his more clearly spatial projects, sculptures and installations, we can practically consider them as expanded paintings capable of invading spaces with a decisive plastic force: in this exhibition they occupy practically all the rooms of the center, accompanied by collages, paintings, drawings, objects and documentation.

In the first area of the exhibition we are welcomed by the installation Barbera tribute to that experimental musician, based on the sum of geometric pieces of wood interrelated with each other; follows Decomposition of placecomposed of a dozen large-format canvases, full of paper collages that join the canvases and expand across the walls of the room. Other collected collages were made with scraps of cut cardboard or scraps of fabric previously painted in oil, arranged here together with paintings, many in cold tones, which are arranged in different series according to their geometry.

Fuencisla Francés: Processes, rhythms and vibrations. Esteban Vicente Museum

A second section of the route has another facility as its axis, vanishing pointalmost six meters high: it is made up of numerous pieces of rectangular wooden structures painted white; They are of different sizes, but when joined they give rise to an imposing sculptural configuration. It dialogues with another medium format one based equally on geometry and volume: Paper 2.

On black and On whiteor, again installations, offer a kind of forest in those tones, a sensation endorsed by the collages that surround them, exposed at different heights, and by a background sound of cicadas that will transport us to summer; The latter corresponds to a sound work by Pep Llopis. This proposal closes with Superstringsan installation made up of large-format oil paintings on canvas, and with mobiles that float, articulating their own rhythms and transferring them to space.

These creations, regardless of their format, suggest a delicate sense of balance between explosion and containment and a certain homage to all the (forceful) possibilities of fragile paper, which in itself can provide warmth compared to the white cube and cold light.