Fernell Franco

Among the works, a significant number of pieces from the archives of Fundación Fernell Franco, many of them exhibited for the first time, could be found. These images permitted a reformulation of the artist’s work, in which experimentation and the continuous artistic exploration of the photographic support significantly configured his artistic proposal. It was thus possible to understand that his interest in portraying Cali and its architectonic decadence as of the 1970s –which caused the disappearance of sites of important historical and cultural value, was the same interest that he had in manipulating the photographic processes in the same way as the city had suffered its decay. The curatorship was divided in two parts: Processes and Sketches. The first part intended to explore the “problems of spatialization and the narrative quality of time in the photographic environment”, using the processes of photomontage, masking or framing through which the artist creates “sequences”; using the processes of illumination and manipulation, thus approaching his production to pictorial problems; and the processes of transformation, in which the systematic process of destruction of the photographic support is presented as a metaphor for the city’s degradation.

The second part, dedicated to Sketches, contained the series Estadio, Trébol, y Sol (Stadium, Clover and Sun), structured entirely in the intimacy of his studio, which illustrated the development of his research aimed at reflecting the temporal quality of photography, as well as of exploring the chances of transforming an image on different types of support and their potential meanings. Una impecable soledad (An impeccable solitude) turns out to be an approach to one of the artists with greater sensitivity, who through the restricted two-dimensional character of photography manages to convey a strong social message.