Francesco Di Lernia Biography
Francesco Di Lernia, born in 1966 in Turin, is an Italian artist who lives and works in the city. He established himself as one of the most interesting talents of the new Turin and Italian painting scene of the early 90s. With his style Di Lernia seems to revive in Turin a tradition of magical and metaphysical painting, born by Felice Casorati and Italo Cremona, and continued through the Surfanta movement of the sixties and seventies. In his paintings, Di Lernia tries to expose the inconsistencies, absurdities and paradoxes of reality, highlighting its intrinsic illogicality. His works are like Ionesco's theatrical productions: initially logical and coherent, they suddenly introduce an irrational and surreal element that turns everything upside down, demonstrating the inadequacy of rules, customs and social norms.
Di Lernia's figures and landscapes are rendered in a blurred and suggestive manner, accentuating the dreamlike and mental aspects of his compositions. Color takes a central role in his work, with Di Lernia favoring artificial, acidic tones of blue, yellow and green that reflect our contemporary world and resist classification within traditional pictorial categories. Colors attract and repel light: exterior scenes are particularly cool, while interior scenes are bathed in a warm golden glow. This chromatic contrast represents a structural measure necessary to differentiate Di Lernia's two ways of working.
