Talent: Melanie Francesca
Photographу: Fabio Scarpati
Styling: Giulia Nori
Photography assistant: Ester Uggiosi
MUAH: Stefania Tranchino
Text: Olga Ivanova
Born in Switzerland and educated at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice, Melanie Francesca’s paintings have been exhibited across Europe and the Middle East in prestigious places in Milan, Paris, Dubai and Kuwait with exhibition held under the patronage of the UAE Minister of Culture.
Strong on the social and radio-tv, Melanie represents an all-round artist who, after having written many books, swings between art and literature with the profound lightness of a great communicator.
Married to an Emirati businessman with whom she had two beautiful children and a wonderful family, she also represents the bridge between two worlds. "It took me three books to resolve our relationship, because it's not easy to get along in our cultural gap. The Westerner was the story of a hysterical girl trying to navigate the Dubai carousel in a sort of gossip-girl world where she was the somewhat idealistic and clumsy writer, allergic to the same jet set in which she was immersed." Always in a hurry, always confused, struggling with her first child, we had to wait for the second book, The Perfect Woman, RCS Cairo-Rizzoli, to witness the drama of a woman that despite the big pressure to be a super multitask woman, is totally imperfect. A mother who gives birth to a premature but wonderful baby girl and feels betrayed by life. Meanwhile, in Il maestro, it's a time of resurrection and reconciliation: she describes the pandemic era in the stern tones of a country, the Emirates, where, between electronic bracelets and disinfection drones, it seems to be living in a futuristic world. But Anna, Melanie's alter ego, live in a Robinson Crusoe-style, on a two-thousand-meter stilt house on the beach while the kids, in quarantine and no schools, enjoy exploring beaches and digging sandcastles. A Paradise tainted by the sour awareness that beyond that beautiful sea in front of their house lies a world of suffering. And Anna's rebellious conscience once again cries out for revolution, in a seesaw of past, present, and future that transforms the pages from a brilliant comedy into a book of philosophical reflection on where we are going as humankind.
This cosmic consciousness is also reflected in her art, in a rarefied and spiritual dimension. While remaining within the carnality of masterfully depicted human bodies—Melanie is a master of anatomy—there is a discourse of spirit, of underworld and Paradise. And so, through her paintings, half classical, half pop, with their vibrant explosion of color, we also explore the history of Europe and of that ancient Italy that gave birth to masters like Michelangelo and Tintoretto, whose fascination she was so captivated that she sought to replicate, in miniature, their spell.
"I believe art is not a question mark thrown at the audience", Melanie says, "but an answer. And the answer is giving meaning to sufferance through beauty. Art is a path, a space where also the ugly of the demons of unconsciousness and sufferance are harmoniously expressed as necessary to ascend to Paradise". Like the Renaissance, the horrid and the marvelous expressed in aesthetic perfection.
The search for beauty is therefore everywhere. Because beauty is harmony and prayer. One of her most acclaimed projects, "The Box” is a structure where figurative and conceptual melt in one installation. With the strong power of her ink stroke, Melanie expresses the body-soul dichotomy of human beings. An essential and decisive line that is vividly experienced and suffered: black ink like the bleeding of her hearth onto the white background of the canvas. The luminosity of the cloth allows the impetus of the line to be seen also from the outside, in a semi-transparency that gives us shadows games, by the outside resembling a lightbox, by the inside with the impression of being in a room of solid walls.
A space enclosed in a concept, from the time of reality to that of enchantment, through a door that concretizes the visitor’s passage from a temporal space to one that is timeless. Metaphor for human consciousness - limited by the body, yet infinite within. Inside the installation, the fusion of light, black structural aluminum bars and black ink images drown on the white surfaces of the soft fabric walls, creates the feeling of stepping into another dimension.
In an interview she said: "I write as if I were drawing, and I draw as if I were writing, narrating worlds." So the Box is like a story, and her books are cinematic, written unrestrained, pure life. In "The Angel," she speaks about a spirit who falls in love with a girl and follows her everywhere to narrate the secrets of existence. Melanie Francesca believes that we are surrounded by spirits, that the afterlife is intertwined and speaks continuously to us. That’s why she also wrote "The Whisper of a God,” a manual born for helping aerial generation, half here and half in the invisible, on the edge of melting together. "I live between two worlds—the material and the spiritual. My art exists where they meet," says Melanie.
Art is writing, and writing is painting and drawing. The perceptual synesthesia of those who live in the space of vibrations, that can transform them into colours or sound and words, and reveal that reality is not about the limitations of human languages but about the universal word of God that pulse under the apparencies.