Francis Offman

While maintaining Francis Offman's characteristic abstract language, the work Untitled can be considered an indirect “portrait” of a place. Created during a residency in Basilicata, the painting, strictly unframed as is his custom, is inspired by the colours and atmospheres of that region and by the exchanges the artist had with the inhabitants during his stay. Traces of this experience also remain in the materials used. “My first contact with this land,” says Offman, 'was halfway there, at the Temple of Hera, where the surface of the soil appeared to be an intense ochre red. Shortly afterwards, at the residence, I happened to find a similar pigment, left as a gift by another artist: I decided to use it as the background for my work, intertwining it with my practices of layering with coffee, chalk and glue." The light, which was ‘particularly clear and unobtrusive,’ also influenced the colours and composition of the work, which has even more pronounced tactile characteristics than usual. It is a painting that is autonomous in its language but linked to the author's experience, in which ‘what was residual or fragmentary becomes form and memory, weaving personal stories into a collective narrative.’

Stefano Castelli