Franco Gentilini (Faenza 1909 - Roma 1981)

Nudes, female faces, still life, cathedrals, New York bridges, banquets, cats, landscapes. All this is the reality that Gentilini places in the picture, recreating it with a style that, according to Lionello Venturi, goes beyond the definitions of abstract or figurative. From the 1930s to 1952 he took part in numerous Venice Biennials. Thanks to his Parisian stays, he developed a language in which the legacy of the "Roman School" is combined with international echoes, including Cubism, Surrealism and Informal French. This then leads him to a personal and immediately recognizable style, iconic even in the lyric essentiality and in the architectural trend of the lines that goes ever more inextricably with the material investigation. A trend that translates, in the formal aspect, the ironic and amused vision acrobats in Rome, of the greengrocers and of the street vendors, of timid and winking neighborhood girls or of astonished and eternal convivial banquets, immutable as the famous cathedrals that will constitute one of the most famous constants of his work.

Guastalla Centro Arte gallery dedicated numerous exhibitions to Gentilini, in Livorno and Pietrasanta, set up in honor of the one who was a friend and an excellent artist for the Gallery. Among the exhibitions in our gallery we remember the important anthology in 2003 and the one on the centenary of its birth in 2010. There are many albums of original graphic works published by our gallery: Gentilini's women (1976), Gentilini 1977, Cathedrales de France (1979), Le ragazze di Roma (1980), Vita e miracoli by Ermenegildo Simontacchi (1980) illustrating an unpublished story by the writer Piero Chiara. In 1983, edited by Graphis Arte, the book Omaggio a Franco Gentilini is published as an Italian version of the same publication by XX Siècle, Paris.