Andrea Francolino (Bari, 1979) lives and works in Milan. At the center of his reflections is the crack, in all its universality and its “infinite variants,” without criticism or prejudice. Additionally, he creates works from the series Water Cracks and Golden Crack. Traversing multiple disciplinary forms such as aesthetics, ethics, and ecology, Francolino in his artistic “evolution” seeks to remain faithful to the much-acclaimed Nature in the final realization of his work, coining the term econcrethic—a union of three words: eco, concrete, ethical—for all interventions and actions carried out with natural materials.

In 2013, he won the San Fedele Prize with Et onne Tempo, an ephemeral and fragile installation work that reconstructs, with cement dust, the plan of the largest shopping center in the world. The work prompts the viewer to reflect on the exacerbation of contemporary consumerism and human vanity.

The relationship between man/product and nature/creation is instead at the basis of Performance di una pianta (2013-2015), a pile of rubble from destroyed works placed outside the artist’s studio awaiting disposal, from which a plant spontaneously grows: it is Nature reaffirming itself and giving new life to what is now inert and abandoned.

Starting from 2015, Francolino dedicates himself to Percorsi, a series of casts of cracks in cement dust impressed on paper. The title of each work records the day, hour, and satellite coordinates of the location where they were made, allowing for the spatio-temporal localization of his artistic action. In the A-Biotic works, on the other hand, the anthropic representation of nature seeks a continuous relationship with plant forms: the paradox of competing with it and trying to imitate or replace it.

In 2018, he continues his research on fractures: the crack becomes the total protagonist of a work that bears its name. On a wall of the Spazio Aperto San Fedele (Milan), a fissure appears that the artist covers along its path with 22kt gold leaf.

From 2022, he begins the so-called cycle of water cracks. In previous works from 2019-2020, the Limits, Francolino used cement or earth dust to imprint the cracks present in specific locations between Nature (meadows, rivers, vegetation) and human construction (roads, buildings) on paper. In these works from 2022, however, the final result is a sort of sculptural positive of the grooves in the ground, with the support “absorbing” their three-dimensionality.