25th May – 30th June 2002
This exhibition displays twenty paintings dating from 1991 to 2001, all acrylics on canvas.
“The pictorial language of Franz Jenull is one which evolves autonomously, while still respecting the concept of the sign-form and the idea that a figurative structure does not deny, but even consents to abstract fragmentation… The painter redefines the results of his own work within the shaky confines between representation and formal structure; he does not want to construct a narrative, nor does he enter into the poetic labyrinths of abstract expressionism; his is a reflection on the relationship between things and the form of things, and he makes very precise stylistic choices. The composition of his work presents a rhythm which seems to distribute itself in a sort of thematic continuity from one painting to the next. It is especially pertinent to consider that at this moment in his painting there is a cohabitation of traces (almost reduced to imprints on the retina) of figures and an interweaving of signs and underlying colours. All appears to want to show us memories of forms rather than forms in themselves… In this way, Janull’s work suggests old structural tensions that are in the intellectual consciousness of the individual before being in his intention to create and express himself: forms matured in the plastic experience of the later Vedova, already shot through with vibrations and now neatly organised, taken from a concert of signs like scaffolding for chromatic solutions. In the game of taking the body out of the figure, that is, the game of reducing it to a pure support structure made of space, time and movement, and making it pictorial matter, Jenull represents the mystery which ties the essence and the appearance of the image as an already noted fact, as though revealed to the spirit a long time before. This is undoubtedly an approach towards abstract transfiguration which has a meditative character, and in that sense is highly original, basing itself on philosophical reflections about the appearance and the substance of reality”

Catalogue: 30x22 cm; 36 pages, 12 colour reproductions. Text by Nicola Nuti.
Edizioni Il Ponte, Florence. Price €10