Description
Francesco Senise lives and works in Lungro where he was born in 1970. He has dedicated much of his artistic production to his hometown, which he loves deeply. Many of his works, in fact, draw inspiration from the wonderful landscapes that surround the town and from the small squares and alleys that characterize it, interpreting them with his extraordinary “visions”.Senise’s almost obsessive attention to the suffering of the miners has deep roots: when he was a child he was particularly struck by the stories of one of his uncles who described the sad life of the workers inside the bowels of the mine, but, above all, by the presence in the entrance hall of the “Camillo Vaccaro” elementary school, which he attended, of some sculptures which represented in a plastic way the immense effort of the salt workers crushed by the weight of the boulders of salt which they carried on their shoulders. Those sculptures anguishedly nestled in the heart of little Senise, they invaded his mind and filled his innocent eyes with tears, becoming, over time, an essential component of his inner experience, until exploding in his art at a mature age, coming to imprint itself on many of his canvases. In these paintings of his, the emphasis is placed on the physical fatigue of the workers which almost completely erases their physiognomies and makes their bodies similar to one another, crushed, as in a circle of hell, under the weight of the salt.
Lungro, also being an important Arbereshe cultural center and seat of the Byzantine Eparchy of continental Italy, represents a wonderful synthesis between Eastern and Western culture and spirituality, and this synthesis clearly shines through in Senise’s works.
A self-taught artist, free from pre-established aesthetic constraints, in just a few years he managed to bring the value of his forms and contents to the attention of the most demanding critics. His artistic activity has placed him in a prominent position in the panorama of Calabrian and non-Calabrian artists, thanks to his undoubted technical skills and participation in exhibition life not only regionally, but also nationally and internationally. His busy schedule sees him present in personal and collective exhibitions in galleries, museums and institutional venues, in art exhibitions and in the major contemporary art fairs.
Heir to the realist trend that descends from Courbet, Daumier and the first Van Gogh, he is not far from the dramatic tension of David Alfaro Siqueiros’ murals which translate the toil of Mexican workers on a giant scale.
