Francisco Infante, b. 1943

The Collection of the Artist

Dissatisfied with the imitative nature of teaching at the Moscow Academy of Arts, Francisce Infante soon came to the conclusion that art could not be taught, and that the artist needed to discover his craft. It was seeing the spontaneous, irrational paintings of Hans Hartung in a Western journal which prompted Infante to turn to abstraction in his search for an artistic voice.

The central ideas to Francisco Infante's oeuvre are the Infinity and Mystery of the world. These are concepts which have fascinated the artist from an early age, and have guided his artistic development in his attempts to rationalise the boundless universe which surrounds him.

''I needed to express the feeling of the infinite filling my being. [...] The problem of language! My renderings of reduced and expanded geometric shapes were the language suitable for depicting my experiences''

His tightly executed graphics recalls the technique of Tatlin, Rodchenko and El Lissitsky, whose preoccupation with form and theory the artist strongly identifies.

From 1975, Infante has focused on the concept of art synthesis, and in particular 'discrete displacement', whereby the artist introduces man-made materials such as plastic or mirrors into the natural environment, both undermining it and at the same time in organic continuity with the landscape. This has been the premise behind the series of installations Artefakty, a chronicle in photographs of the discourse between the artist, the landscape and the spectator, which explores the issues of ambiguity, actuality, and artificiality.

''The form of the spiral corresponds to an internal perception that the world is complete and obeys innate laws, which, one way or another, are comprehensible to man's conscience. Isn't it wonderful, that even in this infinite world, something appears in a structural, constructive form?''

Francisco Infante, ibid, p.62