Franco Costalonga (Venice 1933 - 19/6/2019) worked at his studio in Marghera. The beginnings are self-taught, attending later, privately, the School of Art in Venice, following the teachings of Remigio Butera.
He began as an engraver and etcher winning an award for the LI of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa Collective and he devoted to painting after making a series of paintings that reflect a research focused on color theory.
In the second half of the sixties, he was part of the "Dialectic of Trends", founded by Domenico Cara and he begins to use new materials in his works, thus obtaining the original surfaces, which generate three-dimensional shapes. This research led him later to get close to the "Seven-Veneto”, Bruno Munari, who is Chairman and which is connected with the Center synchronous operation of Brescia.
Costalonga develops as a personal research around the light, changes color-perception of modular structures cromocinetiche analytically opposite, creating visions rarefied and suspended, but always based on a clear and rigorous geometric-spatial construction. He is one of the exponent of kinetic art, an art movement that began to spread in Europe through the work of artist-theorists such as Vasarely and Agam. The expression Kinetic Art or Plastic Kinetic since 1960 entered in the vocabulary of historians and art critics and it is used to define two and three dimensional works in the real movement and moving the "virtual", ie objects in which the phenomena optical motion plays a dominant or that requires active participation of the viewer.
The survey by iconic Costalonga goes in cycles, in fact since 1967 has always been interested in technical problems and aesthetic together: his first modular units, bodies warped mirror, chrome-kinetic objects, the helicoids double in 1977, the structure on movement symmetry in 1980, pseudo relief in 1990, the structures and de-structuring in 1995, the modular curves in 2005. Building on the problem of closed space within the limits of the surface of the painting, the artist tends to expand the visual perception to the outside, through the interaction of rods and strips. The interference that is created between this survey and plan, full and empty, transforms the optical dynamic organization, traditionally two-dimensional poly-dimensional, with a continuous deviation of the point of view, which borders on sculpture and architecture.
Operator also active in visual design and furniture, Costalonga scored numerous awards in these areas. He also took part in the Italian and foreign exhibitions, including: The XI Quadrennial in Rome in 1966, four editions of the Biennale di Venezia, respectively XXXV, XLII, XLV, XLVI; The Grands et Jeunes d'aujourd ' hui: Art cinetique-Peinture-Sculpture at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1972, The 5th International Kunstmesse Art Basel in 1974; Costructivismo the Universidad Central in Caracas in 1976, the Art-Science-color section of the XLII Venice Biennale in 1986, the Freedom 'Art and Transgression, University of Victoria in Melbourne in 2000.
In 2010 the exhibition at the Flavio Stocco gallery of Castelfranco Veneto (TV) with an extensive anthology of works made between the years '60 and 2010 that cover the entire career of the Master.
On 2012 Franco Costalonga is present at the exhibition "Tessuto non tessuto" at the Museo Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice from 17/03 to 06/05, with Nadia Costantini, Gea D'Este, Claudia Steiner. In this, Costalonga investigating the perceptual processes since the sixties, tries, with the use of a special non-woven fabric of his time but still highly relevant, while Nadia Costantini with its forms produces costumes air-structures obtained with the use of precise cuts of polyethylene, acetate, Teflon, up to steel. Gea D'Este operates in a more thoughtful and experienced alternative materials mostly of industrial origin, directly worked in the studio floor in large sheets. Claudia Steiner, painter and potter, in the space of the museum tries to recreate the memory of the fabric with fake pillows and only one wire is left in
witness to the lost material.
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