“One can retrace the history of art through the practice of walking, just like Francesco Careri, professor of architecture at the University of Rome, and by either playfully photographing the light or focusing on significant fragments of reality, capturing the complex inner geometries that recalls their mystery. From the latter method derive the “jewels” of Stefano Fronza (1978), an artist from Trentino capable to inventory in the contracted, yet intense forms of small brooches – photographs memories and emotions, counter-images of the city, all such islands of evocative power… a brief aesthetic credo bearing echoes of post-impressionism and of the avant-garde (Bauhaus - Moholy - Nagy). In short, not what we see but what we see for the first time. T. Eliot once wrote that “humankind cannot bear very much reality”. The matrix image is a photograph generated by a body in motion (sometimes moving at the steps of a dance) with a long time of exposure aimed at building a new suspended reality that resembles every thing and every place, a true violation of persistence, a kind of "De-definition of art" (H. Rosenberg)..

In the silence of a street one feels “comme nulle part ailleurs le vent de l’éventuel” (André Breton), whereas in the silence of the workshop that very listening attitude turns into a shape. The choices that the artist makes when selecting the most significant frames and the materials most suitable to accommodate them reveal not only the founding elements of his poetics, which is foremost expressed in his photographic paper prints, but also the “genetic” trace left in his education by the teaching of an important master such as Peter Skubic, former professor at the Department of Jewelry Design of the then Fachhochschule in Düsseldorf, and by certain acquaintances – a sensitivity regarding perceptive issues and complex geometries that he has acquired from the school of Padua. It is no coincidence that the choice of the materials intersects these two stylistic lines as well as natural and geometric-architectural patterns. We are on a street but we get captured by light, the exterior – interior almost coincide, there is no frame in the sense of a window through which the depicted space can be observed.

As a matter of fact, they are suspended images of every thing and every place, of trees, of Venetian or Viennese lanterns, suffused memories of the architecture of Lucia Moholy and of the glass windows of the Bauhaus in Dessau as if seen under the deforming effect of a chamber of mirrors or captured in the coils of kinetic perceptual theories.

The artist gives shape to his passion by using prints of the highest quality and materials that he then refines in his workshop (aluminum, resins, titanium, steel...in rare cases white gold). In general, his jewels may still be seen as objects made of metals and precious gems but, on a contemporary plan, what adds up to the jewels as such is the material they are made of, the value of which goes hand in hand with the value of the project itself. Fronza’s jewels astonish because of the fact that the object may even get rid of its function (a brooch) and return to be a photograph, a painting."

text written by Prof. Nicola Loizzo - 2024