Gianfranco Foschino

Gianfranco Foschino, with his silent and at the same time exciting video works, belongs to a young generation of artists in Latin America who have become internationally known for their poetry and socio-political explosiveness. In 2011 his work was shown for the first time at the Venice Biennale and in 2014 was presented in the award-winning Chilean pavilion.

Foschino’s works on the boundaries between photography and cinema. His films are made with a fixed camera that is focused on a motif for several minutes: natural landscapes, urban or rural scenes. At first glance, they appear like photographs, but on closer inspection, Foschino’s pictures start to move. Some moments seem to have fallen out of time, images that defy the hectic bustle of our time and therefore pull us all the more under their spell.

With their precise image composition and their most open-end, Foschino’s videos are designed to strain our viewing habits, which are shaped by entertainment cinema. As mundane as his pictures appear, again and again, Foschino consistently pursues his intention to use them to make the limits and structures of narrative film visible and to break them at the same time. In infinitely long shots he draws our attention to scenes in which nothing happens and only a few details change. A tension arises that dissolves into nothing because it refuses to follow the usual rules of dramatic staging. At the same time, our attention to details grows, to small, even insignificant movements and actions, which sensitize us for the artistic quality of these video images and make their almost painterly aesthetics visible.