Live Angle
18.01.2025
01.03.2025

There is a kind of tactile and harmonic quality to the work of Marco Franco (Lisbon, 1972), something we could tacitly name radiation. Simultaneously austere and gentle, it is an aura that emanates from the work in various gestural and sonic digressions, despite its obvious inertia and muteness. Often related to his musical work, Franco’s plastic expression is syncopated by the musical memory that has accompanied the artist for over two decades, giving him a certain innate purity when it comes to transmuting a sonic idealisation into a visual realisation.

Many of these moments are revealed in Live Angle, the artist’s second exhibition at Galeria BRUNO MÚRIAS. Focused, in essence, on the unpredictable sculptural practice that Franco has been developing over the last two years, this set of objects presents the continuation of the artist’s rigorous research into the potential of geometric form. In addition to a sculptural approach strongly linked to a drawing practice (especially with regard to the possibility of transforming a two-dimensional plane into a sculptural one), the artist focuses here on reorganising the physical conditions of the surfaces he works on, giving them new figurative predispositions with each singular expression of a gesture.

Operating according to an abstract mathematical logic, these works radiate diffuse perceptions in terms of their exact formal assimilation, not only in terms of their uneasy internal behaviour — curves, tears and inflicted twists — but, above all, in terms of the question of which is the original body that supports them. All sculptures are variations of the same design, and all of them are triangular in shape. Whether scalene, rectangular or isosceles, each sturdy, stubborn triangle in iron (lacquered) or copper (oxidised) functions like a light, fragile sheet of paper that urgently needs to stand up despite its bodily inevitability. However, as this is a material with a memory that is deeply conditioned by its physical hardness in a solid state, it is precisely through a series of folding decisions — both intuitive and studied — that the artist informs a once flat body into a complex skeleton in terms of its volume and balance, with no natural possibility of correction.

We could also say that in these works lies a monumentality of hypothetical scale, almost as if they were black maquettes for large-scale sculptural objects (a possibility emphasised by the choice of exhibition devices, also designed by the artist). The dissimilarities they present — in their inner contours, in particular, and as a landscape, in general — are like meditative vibrations that create a trial, repetitive and accelerated pulse in the triangular axis that punctuates the exhibition. The minimalist reminiscences they bring together are the result of an accumulation of decisive and fleeting cuts, gestures that search inside for their own latent cellular noise. Absent of any figuration, it is through the symbolic strangeness of the sculptures that we observe the suggestion of volatile images and movements to their surrounding perception. Like a record spinning on a stereo, not only is its plastic shape altered as it rotates, but the echo it emits is transformed and multiplied.

The glass cracks across,
The image
Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.[1]

Eva Mendes

[1] Plath, Sylvia, verse of Thalidomide, in Winter Trees, Faber & Faber, 1971, p. 26.