A selection of the artist’s works documents the profound transformation of his pictorial language over the past few years. While moving away from figuration and its elements, his new direction ventures into an abstract and conceptual dimension that digs into remembrance: what he expressed in the past remains an underground presence in the marks, in the layering of matter and in the chromatic tensions.
“A maieutics of feeling which, in gesture (which often precedes rational thought) and in colour, sets the rhythm of Giuseppe Fratantonio’s inner journey and delves into ‘feeling’, becoming emotional substance and energy. From rarefied, contemplative spaces, with a distant echo of the landscape - explains Manuela Panariello, owner of the Galleria iblea Symposium -, Fratantonio’s pictorial expression arrives at explosions of colour that transform space into a relationship between matter, colour, gesture and emotion.”
The solo exhibition “Travel Notes and the Archaeology of Memory” will be inaugurated on Sunday 22 November at 6:30 pm at Galleria Iblea Symposium, Via Sant’Anna 196, Ragusa, and will be curated by Licia Oddo and Jorge Facio Lince. Alvice Cartelli will speak.
The artist. Giuseppe Fratantonio was born in Modica in 1954. He first exhibited in 1974 and graduated in Architecture in 1980. Alongside painting, he has combined the teaching of Art and Image with freelance practice as an architect, particularly in restoration and in public and private building. Since 2014 he has devoted himself continuously to artistic activity, with an exploration first in oil and then in acrylic, dedicated to the Hyblaean territory, to light and space, and to memory seen through doors and windows (“La Mia Terra”, 2015; “Del Mio Tempo”, 2018). In 2020 he was among the founders, with Salvo Bonnici and six other Sicilian artists, of the movement “Transantigenismo 2020 – Re.St. Art 4.0”, awarded first place at the Biennale dei Normanni.
Internationally, he has exhibited in Brussels, Barcelona, Béziers and London (2016), in Paris at Galerie Thuillier (2022) and at Wolfsburg Castle in Germany (2024). Among his most significant national appearances are Palazzo Zenobio in Venice (“Lo stato dell’arte”, 58th Biennale, 2019), Palazzo Ximenes Panciatichi in Florence (2020), Artexpo in Mantua (2019) and the Modigliani Prize in Spoleto (2018), in addition to substantial participation in the main Sicilian exhibitions. More recently he has exhibited at Donnafugata Castle in Ragusa and at Palazzo Mormino in Scicli (2025). Art critics who have taken a close look at his work include, among others, Vittorio Sgarbi and Paolo Levi. Fratantonio has appeared in Mondadori catalogues and in the volume “Porto Franco”, edited by Vittorio Sgarbi himself.