Cianne Fragione
Cianne Fragione
Cianne Fragione

Cianne Fragione

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BiographyMy art is process-oriented. I am always seeking unexpected, poetic ways of combining found and fine art materials. This practice comes in part from years of living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I encountered a number of Beat-era artists and was touched by their work. In combinations of oil paint, drawing materials, collage, and an unpredictable range of found objects, I strive to uncover the intimate interactions that can occur between individual and cultural identities, and between specific natural and human landscapes. My visual effects are further informed by an ingrained sensitivity to physical movement that draws on my early professional career in dance. I learned to extend outward from my “center” into the area around me, based on the stage as a working space. In the artwork, the sheet of paper is the stage, the space in which movement brings images.

I often work in series. When series overlap chronologically, they often yield fresh, unanticipated connections between themes and materials. Each series claims its identity as separate but related, an approach that grows from long interest in Cy Twombly and Italian artists Mimmo Rotella and Gastone Novelli, who used graffiti-like marks, paint, collage, and scraps of found imagery from many sources.

The series seek a beguiling combination of revelation and secrecy. Titles refer to my encounters with village life in Calabria/Sicilia, which occurred while residing in Southern Italy. Each work remembers and contemplates deeply and at length on those times, in images that bring with them gestures, glances, landscapes and skies, the lovely walls of the medieval towns, life moving with the ebb and flow of Calabrese and Siciliano time, its enigmas, its communal intricacy, the textures of life that expose themselves only gradually, a truly human experience whose essence I hope to convey here.
Person TypeArtist