Franco Scuderi. Castelli di sabbia

Franco Scuderi, born in Turin in 1945, is a Florentine artist by way of adoption. His father was an officer in the Italian army and his mother came from a family of skilled artisans from the Veneto region.
After studying at the Academy of Arts in Florence he began to work with metal and it was only later in this career that he would return to woodcarving.
Between the seventies and the eighties he presented himself as an outright socially active intellectual, ready to explore different artistic languages.
He also founded the independent theatre Castelli di sabbia (Castles of Sand) in Florence and ran a cultural centre in a 15th century chapel.
From an initial starting point in the mid sixties with figurative painting, he passed through a period marked by the geometric rigidity of his shapes, to arrive at the plasticity of three-dimensional compositions with the People, which also coincided with his first trip to the United States.
In an article from the 7th February 1983 by the newspaper, Boca Raton News, he is welcomed to Florida like a new talent born from Renaissance Italy, with the heading New babe in cradle of Renaissance.
His art moves between different extremes; the rational thought that controls the execution of his work, his social motivation which establishes the scope and spontaneous impulse that lends it life.
In the nineties, Scuderi modelled and furnished the spaces of the Palm Beach Villa and was given a teaching position for an art books course.
About ten years ago the artist, who travelled the world, bringing his miniature sculptures with him enclosed in boxes, as if they were the cases of a travelling salesman, returned to live in Florence.
Behind the seeming playful aspect of his work, there lies, in fact, a strong commitment to art.  Scuderi understands that the collective sense of things cannot be ignored.
His people find their raison d’être only in choral expression when they move in harmony to compose works which are the things of dreams.
Dreams that are denied to men by the multitude of Pinocchios aligned on the political scene, the same inescapable black box on which our destiny is written.

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