STATION – preface by Sandra benvenuti
Franco Donaggio’s soul has always lived in the restlessness of research and, with his art expertise, he heads for horizons of spirituality. The author investigates the big enigma of life: who we are and where we are going. It is exactly from this question that the series Station originates. The artist chooses for his stage the Central Station in Milan as the ideal base to start from, a non-lieu par excellence. From a station either you leave or arrive, and during your wait or along the route you can lose yourself.
The author catches the ethereal frailty of a moment without barriers and transports it elsewhere, almost beyond distance. In this series, Donaggio creates the paradox of an unreal snap-shot, namely the perception of observing a perfect photo shoot which, in brief, does not exists: it is actually an image that takes shape in the experimentation of a new story through a projection of a slide reflected in a deforming mirror, and that eventually leads you towards a new perception of reality.
The strange sensation that paradoxically pervades you, is that the real truth makes way for the fictitious one, thus living a new realistic completeness with the final work of the artist.