Biography
Franco Viola was born in Gaeta on 12 March 1953. Since very early childhood, in addition
to a precocious artistic inclination, he displayed a true cult of nature and established a
relationship of profound admiration of and participation in the greatness of natural events.
In the beginning, his artistic activity was primarily dedicated to graphic arts, and on his
frequent solitary excursions in the countryside around his city, he analyzed and drew the
elements comprising the landscape, at first hoping to gain familiarity with the essence of
the views and to reproduce the very spirit of nature, personified as in Goethe’s belief, yet
with the analytical and lyrical depth of Klee.
His earliest watercolors and successive oil paintings already demonstrate Viola’s ability to
combine reality and interiority in landscapes, seeking to confer them with the emotion and
the sublimity of uncontaminated reality.
His artistic schooling paralleled his scientific studies and research in the field of space
studies, which significantly contributed to his creative development with a holistic approach
that was rooted in the phenomena of reality, thereby contributing to the enrichment of the
growth of his very particular pictorial language.
His artistic and conceptual path, focused on the analysis of the landscape and its
phenomena of light and color, was initially influenced by the northern European
Expressionism of Nolde, Kirchner and Munch and gravitated in later years towards the
artistic language of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism.
In particular, his most recent works are the result of Viola’s growing interest in the
minimalism of Barnett Newman, the luminosity of color and the lyrical abstraction of Mark
Rothko, as well as in Clyfford Still’s concept of the sublime.
The public and critical reception was immediately positive in the early 1990s. In fact, in
1993, after his first solo exhibits in Italy, Viola was invited to show his work at the Italian
Institute of Culture and at the Intercultural Center of Georgetown University in Washington,
D.C. In the same year, Riposati Editeur, Paris, published his first monograph, which was
later followed by eight others, curated among others by Peter Weiermair, director of the
Gallery of Modern Art of Bologna, and by Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Kunsthalle of
Bremen, which hosted his solo exhibit in April 2004.
Before that, his solo exhibits had been hosted, among others, by the Hoffmann-von-
Fallersleben-Museum in Wolfsburg (2000) and, in 2003, by the Italian-American Museum of
San Francisco and by the State Museum of Contemporary Art in Salonicco, Greece.
In addition to the writings by Peter Weiermair and Wulf Herzogenrath mentioned above,
Viola has also been written about by Rolando Bellini, Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri, Giorgio Di
Genova, Mario De Micheli, Vittorio Sgarbi, Wolf-Günter Thiel and Duccio Trombadori.