I love oil, on board or on canvas, I love its pastiness, the material, the contact with colors, I also use my fingers ”. Its oils are "almost greedily savored by the caress of the color-impregnated fingers that have sculpted the volumes". The dominant theme in his art is nature.
Francesca Orfino paints what she sees instinctively without a specific purpose. None of his paintings are built or imagined, everything comes from direct contact, from a fascinated and attentive look. To the overall view, to the wide and dispersive landscape, our artist prefers the detail. The leaf, the flower that comes from a stone, the crack in the wood: they are the details that capture attention, strike, excite.However, there is no lack of landscapes in its repertoire.
Deep and endless, they express all his sense of freedom. As in the definition of the ancients, even in his paintings art is an imitation of nature. And nature has always been an object of contemplation by man, in whose eyes it presents itself with a perpetually new magnificence.
"I love autumn colors, reds, the atmosphere of certain seasons, I love still lifes". Flowers, fruit, inanimate objects with Francesca Orfino's brush acquire soul. As if crossed and intimately pervaded by a breath of life that recalls, today, what the seventeenth-century writer Francesco Lana said about Caravaggio: "in painting these objects one takes a certain frankness in working, which is very beneficial and inanimate". Sometimes enchanting, sometimes threatening and imposing, nature has another surprising aspect: its variety and concreteness has always had a sense of familiarity. And even more familiar are these works that never hide the artist's southern character, and indeed, boldly manifest it in the cracking of figs and other typical fruits of his land or in the pure strength of sunflowers, calla lilies and mimosas. All the subjects live through the light of a southern sun, sometimes soft and delicate, sometimes joyful and bursting.
This is Francesca Orfino who, even before being an artist, is a woman. And as such it has faced numerous obstacles, from the lack of opportunity to attend the Academy to the distrust of some gallery owners, to the usual difficulties of the contemporary art market. On the other hand, being a woman has embellished her art, which continues to amaze with its undeniable and boundless sensitivity. That ability to observe and scrutinize and then return, with new light and greater feeling. She is a mother, she is a companion, generous and sensitive in life as in art. He knows the pain, the real one, which, day after day, will make painting his refuge, his outlet, and then his rebirth.
"I clung to art, it was my light". Today she is a new woman, strong and serene. His eyes say it, as deep as the sea. His paintings, wonderfully spontaneous and sunny, confirm this.
