Francisco Infante

Francisco Infante, b. 1943 in the village of Vasilievka, in the Saratov region. His father was a political émigré of Spanish origin, who, like many artists, fled Franco’s regime. Having had moved to Moscow after his father’s premature death, Infante’s Russian mother enrolled him in Surikov Art Institute in Moscow. He worked at a very early age as a book illustrator and interior designer. In 1964, two years after finishing his studies, Infante, along with several other artists, formed an association called Dvizhenie (the Movement Group). The group’s principal aims were initially concerned with geometry in art, constructivism, built on the Russian avant-garde, and now began to produce kinetic art. He left the group in 1970 to work independently, but these early experiences already set the discourse for Infante’s prolific oeuvre.

Infante’s works primarily deal with the relationship between the natural and artificial worlds, often questioning the way we perceive nature through our ‘artificial’ reading. Since the early 1970’s Infante and his wife/collaborator, Nonna Goriunova, began to document their works, which were fittingly titled Artefacts. This interventional practice of altering our perception of nature, thus creating a new reading, bases itself upon design’s optical charm and landscape’s romantic origin, is apparent in his more recent work such as Artifacts from the Series Appliques, of 1993. Multi-colored abstract lines follow the contours of the landscape, adding a multiple