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REVIEWS
Carlo Francou
Getting into the mistery of existence.
(2001)
Milena Milani
Art, a neverending gift.
(1991)
Osvaldo Patani
A little paper for Franco Pizzi.
(1990)
Ferdinando Arisi
Realism and immagination in today's sculpture in Piacenza.
(1980)
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From the catalogue personal exhibition – Gallery “8,75” – Reggio nell'Emilia (Italy). (2003)
 The annals of Tibetan wisdom recount that a monk named Lao Tseu one
day stopped in petrified bewilderment in front of his fellow
Song's vibrating and lithe sculptures and let slip this praising
remark: “Brother Song rather than devoting himself to the
creation of forms mostly worries about the air around them”.
Franco Pizzi, an artist from Piacenza, graduated at “Paolo
Toschi” Institute of Parma, does the some.
This
seems atypical, seen that traditional sculpture strived to
capture space, to engulf the air and remodel turough the
ductility of forms, the solidity of expanding volumes and the
heaviness of a matter that, althought it is rended light the
breath of art, it is is firmly rooted 'in the eart' and has its
retribution from void, that is to say from
nothing................
On
the contrary, Franco Pizzi's flowers, animals and people float
with "their heads in the clouds": not only because of the dreamy
sweetness of some of is paintings (il contatto) whose subjects
seem lost in a private tale, but mostly thanks to the fact that
they aim at flying up, and do it. When they float, defying
gravity that links them to the earth, their material, bronze or
terracotta, melted by the contact with the atmosphere, crumble
and draw up air and light, opens up into fan-shaped from which
doesn't kill the volume of forms bat the contrary it expands and
inflates it letting it free to fluctuate like a
breeze..................This is why,instead of structures solidly
carved in space by chisel we have sculptures that seem painted in
it wich an expressionistic and informal touch.
Some
of his polymorphous shapes and twisted laminaes evoke Leoncillo's
turgid forms.  Some of his flowers remind us of the organic-like
volutes of Ans Arp. He means no dramatic tone or polemic intent:
he has an unconscious regard for late-Romanticism and its lyric
languors and for an utopian idea of society which finds his
champion in Medardo Rosso, and a modern sympathizer in Franco
Pizzi...........
Pizzi
doesn't aspire to capture eternity, or, more to the point: he
prefers to eternalize an istant, the flash of an expression, a
movement, a throb of life right before their disappearing. He
knows that this is the only certitude we have.
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CARLO FRANCOU
Getting into the mistery of existence.
From the book “In the Labs of Art”. (2001)
 A
used small note-book with some pastel drawings. An Egyptian
landscape with the pyramids and a minaret, a sketched portrait, a
sailing boat sailing to unknown lands. On the once white pages,
now yellowish, of that little atlas, somone has drawn sketches
among the maps. On the last page of the eastern Mediterranean
sea, the indented Turkish coast and the Aegean islands.
”My
father Joseph was a primary school teacher and during the war he
was sent there. He died at Kos in the Aegean sea, shot by the
Germans after 8th September” (1943).
Joseph
Pizzi, the father of the sculptor Franco Pizzi and of the painter
Gaby left for the GreeK front in the March of 1943- Franco was
born in the June of the same year, but five months later his
father would be shot dead – a very short life it was.
For
us, especially when we were kids, our father's only memoris were
his photos and his booklet only we used to look through it with
regret”.
The
sculptor's father's idealized figure took form in a work that the
artist made in 1978 for the sacrary of Sermoneta, near Latina: a
monument dedicated to the people died in the Aegean Sea. The
monument shows the stylized figure of a man sentenced to death by
shooting; he is seen in the exact moment of his sacrifice, with
the holes made by the bullets in his body and his mouth half –
open in the last vital breath. Behind him there is a tree trunk,
perhaps to remind people of the holy wood of the Cross, the
symbol of another sacrifice.
Franco
Pizzi conveys his own sensations, ideas and feeling into all his
works, not only into the one describet above. We alwais see
works. That show the sculptor's shy, discreet and introvert
personality; he is proner to interiorize than to express himself
in an extrovert way...................Franco Pizzi shows me one
of his sculptures, called “The refugees” That reminds
us of Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor East, entire peoples that move,
refugees that run aways from violence. In These works there is
more introspection; Franco Pizzi has put aside his flowers on
behalf of something deeper that goes to the root, but without
completely forgetting his previous work.Before
leaving the atelier, my glance goes to the small atlas with
Franco Pizzi's father's drawings. Franco Pizzi has never met his
father but I'm sure he has met and will meet him every time he
creates a new sculpture.
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MILENA MILANI
Art, a neverending gift.
By the paper “Il gazzettino di
Venezia” (1991) – personal exhibition at
Cortina d'Ampezzo.
 ..........I sometimes thought that flowers, in their sublime shapes might
grow, get bigger, become sculptures, monuments. Everything had already
been invented, it existed on earth, in the sunlight. You only had to be
able to look, absorb those contents, those lines, so new, elegant,
sensitive and the “flower-sculptures” would have a long life for
everybody's joy.
 In the shade of stamen and pistils of the heavenly stems, of sweet
calyxes, I would be peaceful because I had found my shelter, that
blossomed and steady oasis that would have no ending, no decay.
The sculptor Franco Pizzi, a visionary artist, has made my desire his own
and he has fulfilled it without my knowing it and now with his “wax model
to lose” fusions he offers to me and to everybody his golden bronze
sculptures, unique examples that have the lightness of real flowers, of
dreams with unusual names: water lily, periwinkle, edelweis,lily of the
valley, poppy, sunflower............
il complesso degli organi di riproduzione delle piante Fanciful words,
sweet syllables that I say spellbound, because I remember what my father
used to say and also the painter Filippo de Pisis who knew Latin and had
the right name for every flower, never making any mistakes. De Pisis after
used to paint flowers, once he painted a watercolour for me with some
zinnias in a glass; he gave it to me in Venice as we were in his studio at
San Barnaba.
Flowers have got many powers and the “flower-sculptures” double them, They
make them hundreds. In Cortina d'Ampezzo where double them, They make them
hundreds.Franco Pizzi displays his works there is this vague mistery of
sexuality.
The flowers are the reproduction organs of the phanerogam
plants, different male fimale organs, hidden inside, but also showns,
visible tender and proud at the same time; the heart of life, the flash of
poetry and imagination. Franco Pizzi has spiritualized them as if they had
a musical halo, a persistent thrill of notes something that detached from
structures to comunicate with the supernatural world.
Rapture? Or burning fire, we don't ask for any explanations, I too accept
what I see, because we don't know how transformations take place, through
inscrutable roads. The roads of art, a nervering gift.
Cortina d'Ampezzo, november 29 1991
Photo – "Ragazzi del Brentei" Monument (Piacenza).
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OSVALDO PATANI
A little paper for Franco Pizzi.
by catalogue for the personal exhibition at the “Ada Zunino art gallery” in Milan. (1990)
 I know Franco Pizzi lives in the provinces far away from the lure of
fashions. I appreciate his works because he rinforces the idea that a
sculptor, especially in is smallized works, must be overscrupulous and
work with the passion of a grand craftsman of Fabergé's time.
A sculptor, a flower glower Franco Pizzi has sung a song with a garden of
memory flowers, today's homage to Jugendstil, the last follower of a
disappeared world. I think a house without flowers is unthinkable for
Franco Pizzi even because it is like a soullen person – That's why he
makes eternal flowers that don't look dead, that give a precious scent to
refined eyes, with a hint of homesickness for gardens that are getting
rarer and rarer. From this frustration the free, garden, unique wax model
to lose flowers were born; flowers hold by a snake-like stem that Moser,
H. Erté and the first Picasso would have liked.
These musical flowers by Franco Pizzi , as shiny as tropical leaves in the
sun, are like a shadow without a body, afroid of disappearing.
I hope this exhibition of Franco Pizzi's works housed in Ada Zunino's
gallery, a friend of sculpture, will cause a sensation.
FERDINANDO ARISI
Realism and immagination in
today's sculpture in Piacenza.
By catalogue national exhibition “Le vie dello sguardo“. (1980)
 ............You can't accuse the sculptors working in Piacenza of
uniformity of techniques. Franco Pizzi for example, who has recently
appraeched sculpture, seems getting inspired by flower petals in his
working clay, sinuous wripping way of on the soft surface as slippery as
octopus skin or jellyfish, broken by thin, vibrating lips in large
lacerations; personal ways in the contrasts between solid and empty spaces
seem to hint more at would – be shapes than at fixed structures, defined
volumes.........
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