Franco Fontana

Introduction

The photographic work Paesaggio, Puglia, 1987 stands as one of the most eloquent and accomplished visual manifestos of the poetics of Franco Fontana, the undisputed pioneer of European color photography and a master of landscape abstraction. In this shot, the Apulian region is stripped of all vernacular, folkloric, or purely documentary connotations, to be transmuted into a field of pure perceptual and chromatic investigation. The image, built on rigorous horizontal bands of saturated color, deliberately distances itself from the three-dimensional representation of reality, approaching the ontological status of American Color Field painting.