Franco Paisio, Australian-Based Italian Abstract Painter and Poet

A brief profile of Italian painter, Franco Paisio, who makes his home in Sydney, Australia. Paisio is also a poet and has published four poetry books.

Australian-based Italian painter and poet, Franco Paisio is a Scorpio. Both his painterly eye, and the one which observes his thoughts, have the laser-like perception often accorded a November-born. Franco though, totally and virulently opposes unproved or unprovable notions; in this case, astrology, which he refers to as a 3,000 year old superstition.

“The plural of anecdote,” he says, “does not translate into ‘evidence.’ Everything hinges on the weight of proof, but all around me a great many people believe in homeopathic cures, herbal remedies, tarot readings, religion, astrology and many other nonsensical superstitions. How shoddy the standard of evidence some of us are willing to accept.”

His ideas and ideals challenge, but the hint of veracity underlying them makes you want to look again, and again, and again at both his extraordinary paintings and his stark poetry.

Who is Franco Paisio?

He was born in Milan in 1936. During the war his family took refuge in their country house near Sorrento on the Bay of Naples. Then almost five, while facing the blueness of the sea and the island of Capri, Paisio’s consciousness began to take shape. Also taking refuge, his uncle Zio Ludovico who was a dramatic actor, read poetry and verse-plays to Paisio, opening his young ears to the power of words.

“Papà used to take me for excursions in the fields and point out minute things like the beauty in a blade of grass, the venations of leaves, the yellowness of daffodils and then, the vastness of the sky, the stars, the galaxies. He was a good Sunday-painter, and a skillful sketcher. Together my father and uncle planted in me the seeds of curiosity and creation. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would grow up to become a poet.”

Franco Paisio Study and Influences

Paisio studied at the Piero Vannucci Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia. At 18 three of his poems were published in literary magazines and he thought he was on his way to being a poet, but in 1957 his family moved permanently to Australia. Suddenly silenced by the lack of language, (he only spoke Italian and French) Paisio lost his means of communication.

“I went back to painting (the image has a more universal idiom), and enrolled at Bissietta Art School in Sydney. Professor Bissietta was a fine Florentine painter and a great teacher. We became friends and had great conversations about art, and literature and politics.”

Bissietta was Paisio’s most significant teacher, his devotion to figurative painting notwithstanding. His attention to detail, his painting method, sense of ethics and aesthetics all left an indelible mark. Bissietta, the same age as Paisio’s father, was a rationalist and perhaps even a romantic, but Paisio is very much of his own generation and has been greatly influenced by phenomenology and existentialism. These philosophies soon caused him to abandon figurative art and embrace abstractionism.

“My art, like my world, is made out of feelings through which I express my uncomfortable existence. I do not paint to tell little stories. My abstract paintings are never a copy of reality. They are what they are; reality itself. I was brought up loving, and I still love, many figurative painters, from Giovanni Bellini, Piero Della Francesca, Goya to Morandi, Picasso, and Matisse, but the painters that influenced me are the non-figurative artists: Miro, Rothko, Fontana, Motherwell.”

Artistic Mediums

Paisio paints mostly in acrylic on polycotton and finishes his works in fast drying Alkyd oils. Although a painting may take a long time to mature in concept, once it is time to put it on canvas, he works as fast as possible to preserve the original feelings before subsequent ones can intervene. “That’s why I like working on paper so much; drawing is more immediate than painting, doesn’t have time to lose its freshness.”

Paisio’s first book of poems was published in Italy and awarded a National Prize for Poetry in 1961. He has contributed many poems to established literary publications and anthologies, both in Australia and overseas and has performed numerous poetry readings. From 1975 to 1985 he was a contributing editor to Aspect, the Sydney-based art and literature magazine. He currently has four books in print, two in Italian, Poesie del quaderno blu, (SIA, Bologna 1961), and Col Gusto della morte sulle labbra, (Rebellato, Padua 1963); and two in English with drawings. These are Unbelongingness, (Books and Writers, Sydney 2004), and Distances, (Wild & Woolley, Sydney 2005).

Franco Paisio Works in Public Collections

Franco Paisio’s paintings are held in the National Gallery of Australia collection, Horsham Art Gallery, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, Swan Hill Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Philip Morris Collection and in numerous other private and public collections including in Italy, Sweden, Holland, Denmark, England and many other countries. He has been regularly interviewed for radio and television and is represented in several arts publications including Who’s Who of Australian Visual Artists, D W Thorpe, Melbourne 1996, and Alan and Susan McCulloch Encyclopaedia of Australian Art, Allen & Unwin 1994.

Source: Theresa Sjoquist interview with Franco Paisio, 2011

©Theresa Sjoquist