Federico de Francesco: Just How I Like It Tennis Elbow 128

Federico de Francesco is a lot like his paintings. He’s colorfully forceful and direct. He’s a little hyper and messy. He’s also realistic but quixotic and even a bit non-objective. He’s complex, he’s fluid, he’s blunt, he’s vague, he’s provocative, he’s elegant—and he’s compulsively likable even if you can’t put your finger on why.

So it’s a little ironic that one adjective people commonly use to describe his paintings is the one de Francesco resists the most. “Abstract,” he says flatly. “I hate that word. Whatever it means.”

Maybe it’s his background in non-abstraction. For most of his young life, de Francesco studied to be an economist. Growing up in in Calabria in southern Italy, he went on to study economics at university in Milan, which he followed up by moving to California to get a PhD in economics at UCLA.

But when he finally achieved that milestone, he surprised and dismayed his parents by telling them he was going to become a painter—the economics of being a struggling artist being well known to all. But having studied economics for so long, de Francesco had developed an abiding interest in the core concept of equilibrium, and it was a state he wanted to explore in a less numerical medium.

His new show of painting does exactly that. More specifically, it explores that balance as a function of differences between drawing and painting, and what happens as the former is transformed into the latter.

“Drawing is really the most intimate form of making art,” says de Francesco. “The pad is right there in your lap, and it’s a size that relates to your hand, and the charcoal or crayon or whatever you’re using becomes an extension of your hand and fingers. Painting is more complicated, less intimate.You’re standing up, you relate to the canvas with your whole body, and the brush is really more like an extension of your arm.” Unlike the black- and-whiteness of drawing, he adds, painting relies on the specific, conscious application of

paint and colors that you mix and choose and manipulate very purposefully. Where drawing feels private, an exercise you do for yourself, painting feels public—even performative.

He compared it to the difference in playing a violin (which he did growing up) and playing the piano.The size and placement of the violin (close to the heart and the throat), the intuitive way of playing it, and its sound that’s so similar to the human voice, all make for a remarkably intimate instrument and experience. By contrast, the massive piano which one must sit at in order to dexterously push its 88 black and white buttons with both hands and feet, is far more like a machine that one operates.

De Francesco’s new paintings are literal explorations of how the interior medium transmogrifies into the exterior one. Often inspired at first by a charcoal drawing he has done on paper, de Francesco uses large oil sticks to make a drawing on a canvas. (Other times, he says, he begins by drawing a rudimentary tree form.)Then, the painting begins—a tentative, trial-and-error process that’s multi-pronged, a combination of brushstrokes, washes, drips, hand smears and globs, the whole of it aimed at creating a message that’s balanced between order and chaos, public and private.

Or, if you want it more physical terms, balanced between poise and pain.The artist went through a breakup recently. So as much as he was conscious of the less intimate aspects of painting, he was also impelled to get viscerally messy, using his hands to smear agonized wads of pigment as much as he used brushes.

Perhaps most expressive of all are those thick lines tracking across the paint, drawing on top of painting. For de Francesco, there’s nothing more intimate and more performative than his extra-large oil sticks—because there’s no artistic medium closer to the phallus. But even so, equilibrium is paramount. He never lets it get out of hand.

David Colman