PRESENCIAS SIN CUERPO, ALCANCES SUBURBANOS QUE NO FUERON
October 30, 2019

Franco's pieces derive from the places he has visited, where he collects fragments of industrial paint from walls and then paste them on racks that become random topographies. Influenced by the processes of Jacques Villeglé or Mark Bradford, his work is dictated by the findings and the history of the streets.

Simultaneously methodical and gestural, Arocha's works exude an awareness of themselves, walking along a thin line between the plastic strategies of the Nouveau Réalisme and an archeology of the pictorial layers accumulated on the architectural surfaces. At first glance, its colorful palette of random forms presents a relatively flat two-dimensional scenario, but on closer inspection, the process slowly reveals itself to the viewer.

The fragments have replaced the traditional brushstrokes, coexisting in a patchwork of timeless footprints that create an abstract landscape. They become a memory, a fleeting second between life and death; who adopted the condition of permanence. Thus, this quality both familiar and abstract of the work acts as a mirror without reflection, where we recognize ourselves without seeing each other.

Arocha's mania for collecting this “urban skin” provides a certain type of method that we could designate as a productive restriction. However, the pieces do not obey rules in the sense of conceptual or minimalist art. Rather, this restriction seems to arise from the implicit properties of the tools, underlining - through their pigments - the relationship of the works with the passage of time and their poetry.

Franco Arocha values this recycled material as fragments of biographical processes and plays with our assumptions about abstraction, remembering how this aesthetic can interact in mere everyday life.

- Aurélie Vandewynckele
MFA Université du Québec & Concordia, Montréal