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From the book “In
the Labs of Art”.
 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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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.
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