To mark AMACI’s 22nd Contemporary Art Day, the Bongiani Art Museum Collection is presenting a retrospective by Franco Panella titled *PagineSparse e presenze diversamente asemiche* (1988–2026). Curated by Sandro Bongiani, the exhibition showcases the research-driven work of the Sicilian artist, featuring 72 pieces created between 1988 and the present. The event highlights the marginal status often occupied by artists dedicated to such research—creators who continue to work in unique and original ways, pursuing a conscious and extraordinary personal journey.
Within the contemporary art landscape, there are artists like Franco Panella who have drawn upon the fire of the *Informel* past to reclaim the nuances of memory and the essence of painting, venturing convincingly into uncharted territories of discovery and poetic invention—realms where experimentation has, over time, led to new and unexpected destinations. In the introduction, Sandro Bongiani writes: […] “With his *Pagine Sparse* (Scattered Pages) and artist’s books, Panella shares a persistent obsession with hidden otherness, presenting us with the perfect practical application of the ‘semantic void’ and the need for silence theorized by Gillo Dorfles. While Dorfles viewed asemanticity as a respite from visual hypertrophy, Panella translates this concept into a genuine form of material writing and vision; here, the page and the book shed their function as vessels for concepts to become pure aesthetic objects. They evoke the structure of writing through lines, perimeters, and diagonals of an irrational nature, while allowing the trace of the mark to persist. It is a decidedly ‘seismographic’ pictorial vision capable of recording a profound event and becoming a space of absolute meditation: the observer is no longer required to ‘read the word,’ but rather to contemplate the traces of a universal, silent, and trans-linguistic language. In short, it is a metaphor for writing-as-painting—a moment and an event where the body transforms into energy and then into an incomprehensible mark, much like two seemingly parallel trajectories that emerge to form a misaligned yet compelling path, harmonizing with the rhythm and layout of the *pagina sparsa*. Franco Panella’s fully realized poetic inquiry possesses the remarkable ability to transcend the act of writing, transforming it into a complex pictorial and poetic action. His works on paper no longer harbor messages to be deciphered, but rather ‘inner landscapes’—unusual compositional rhythms in which one can lose and rediscover oneself, thereby celebrating the void and the mystery of the apparition before it transforms into a mere written word.
Widely known for his original books and asemic pages, this Sicilian artist has been active since the 1970s, participating in significant national and international contemporary art events. He has lived and worked in Monreale (Palermo) for several years.
