Francesco Bocchini

Was born in Cesena (1969).
He attended the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, benefiting from the early works of painter
Luciano Comini, also from Emilia Romagna.
He lives in Gambettola just outside Forlì,
travelling a few kilometres to his studio
in Sant’Angelo. His native and adoptive region
is still Emilia Romagna, a land with a rich tradition
of talents, visionary poets, polite eccentrics
and surreal geniuses, those strange characters portrayed by Fellini and Tonino Guerra.

He presides over a realm made up of sheets
of metal that come back to life in his hands,
infused with a vital spirit to create mechanisms
and installations with powerful stories to tell.
His approach seems playful, entertaining and rather casual, but when you turn the handle of one of his sculptures they are shaken by a jerky, schizophrenic movement, awakening a fractured, wayward
material stripped to reveal its oxidised essence
and life as a reject, miraculously touched
by the hand of the artist.

You feel as if you are watching a kind of magnificent stutter: the works come to life at the touch
of a human hand but their voices are oscillating, uncertain. Despite this, nothing of their magic
or their splendid epiphany is lost.