FRANKO B :TEXT

David Thorp

Franko B

Franko B’s life and his relationship with art has been an unorthodox one. He is pursuing a

quest to ex press what might be described as the beauty inherent in suffering. Franko B’s

endeav our, while not the currency of mainstream contemporary art, has nonetheless
been the focus for artists throughout history .

Franko B is best known for his liv e performances, which he began to make in the mid-
nineties. He has described these acts as focusing on the v isceral “where the body is a

canv as and an unmediated site for representation of the sacred, the beautiful, the
untouchable, the unspeakable and for the pain, the lov e, the hate, the loss, the power and

the fears of the human condition.” In Franko B’s performances, he uses his own body as a
site for the ex pressiv e representation of the v isceral acts catalogued abov e. He ex poses

his own need and v ulnerability in a starkly ex posed manner that usually incorporates his

phy sical nakedness, and the controlled shedding of his own blood.

In an essay on Franko B’s work, Sarah Wilson has prov ides an illuminating and detailed
account of his childhood and early y ears. Describing him as “a latter-day Jean Genet,”

she draws out parallels between their two liv es.

[Like Genet], Franko generates a tension between the abject, the ev ery day and high
culture: his hy bridity constitutes an essential part of his message…Genet’s story was that

of an illegitimate, adopted, changeling boy , who created a univ erse of homoerotic lov e
and meaning out of the degradation of his prison ex periences.

She discusses Franko B’s infancy in an orphanage in Italy and his return – after a brief

reconciliation with his mother as a y oung boy – to a Red Cross institution. The
depriv ation of his y oung life, and his initial ex posure to the Renaissance art in Florence

while in a Red Cross holiday camp is compared by Wilson to the discov ery by Genet, in
prison, of the possibilities of literature.

The surface of Franko B’s body and head are now tattooed with images. The red cross
appears repeatedly on his head and the rest of his body is decorated with images and

slogans that testify to the intensity of his inner life and his relationships. Lay ers of words,
including hav e been etched into his back, the scars now tattooed ov er with the image of a

red heart in a box . Beneath the heart, just below his waist, is the word ‘Belov ed,’ bonded
by two more hearts decorated with a border of flowers. Blue and red tattooed images

cov er Franko B’s cranium, they cascade down his chest and arms, they ride up his legs.

Usually when Franko B makes a liv e performance these tattoos are concealed beneath a
surface of white pigment that cov ers him from head to toe, allowing the dark red of his

blood to be the only colour present in the work.

In an interv iew with Gray Watson, Franko B stated,

Like most of my work Oh Lov er Boy is a painting in itself and a performance where I use
the body as a site of representation…I use the body as a canv as, as a way to make

pictures.
The relationship between performance and painting is long standing. A ction Painting in

America, and Tachism in Europe, both combined the act of mark-making with the final

painted object. Happenings dev eloped the participatory nature of the artist’s phy sical

being as a core element within the art-making process and created a theatrical audience
for an ev ent. Often, the traces from such ev ents became the concrete artwork, in the form

of paintings or sculpture and assemblages. Sarah Wilson’s link between Franko B and Jean

Genet marks a literary similarity but, within the v isual arts, the A ktionism of the Austrian
artist Hermann Nitsch also bears comparison. Nitsch attempts to create a total art that

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prov ocativ ely and v iolently confronts the conv entions of art. Making performances as

part of his total theatre – the Orgien My sterein Theatre, Nitsch ritualises the act of
creation. His works hav e included the ex cesses of ritual crucifix ion and animal sacrifice

as he activ ely seeks catharsis through pain and compassion. Like the early action
painters, whose paintings could be considered the outcome of a performativ e act,

Nitsch’s paintings are incorporated into his performances, many of which incorporate
smearings of blood. Blood, pain and compassion, and the corporeal v iscerality of the

artist’s action link Franko B with the primev al condition of art.

Throughout the history of art, the cathartic property of suffering has been central to the

practice of painting. Within that genus, the marty rdom of Saint Sebastian has been

returned to repeatedly as a subject for painters, an icon of Renaissance art to which the
y oung Franko B was ex posed. Paintings of Saint Sebastian depict a y outhful figure of great

androgy nous beauty , and almost without ex ception they portray his suffering. Semi-
naked, bound to a tree or column, his body pierced with arrows, he gazes towards heav en

with a beatific countenance. With the ex ception of Christ on the cross, Saint Sebastian
was, originally , the only acceptable model av ailable to artists wishing to paint the male

nude. This and the apocry phal tales surrounding his death may hav e lead to his

subsequent standing as a homosex ual marty r. In his essay on Saint Sebastian as the
homosex ual’s saint, Richard Kay e writes,

In the Renaissance, Sebastian emerged as an ex traordinarily popular subject for
painters, perhaps riv aled only by Jesus and Mary ; he was especially prized by artists who

saw in the y oung saint a figure of Hellenic lov eliness. Numerous painters--Tintoretto,
Mantegna, Titian, Guido Reni, Giorgione, Perugino, Botticelli, Bazzi ("Il Sodoma")--recast

Sebastian as a marty r beatifically receptiv e to his arrow-ridden fate… It was primarily

the Renaissance depiction of Sebastian that serv ed a later, ex plicitly homosex ual cult of
St Sebastian that took hold with remarkable force beginning in the nineteenth century .

The cathartic link between blood, suffering, redemption and homosex uality underpin
Franko B’s art and place him firmly within an art historical trajectory that spans fiv e

hundred y ears.

In 2003, Franko B produced a book of photographs entitled Still Life. With a tex t by Tim

Etchells, the book contains images of rough-sleepers and the detritus of their liv es.
Cardboard box es, flattened piles of blankets and sleeping bags, shrouded bodies; each

person is asleep, unidentifiable, cov ered by the blankets and box es that prov ide their

shelter. These photographs, taken by Franko B with great sensitiv ity , av oid any sense of
ex ploiting his subjects. They depict beauty in distress as poignantly as any

contemporary reading of the Saint Sebastian my th or the total theatre of Hermann
Nitsch. Rather than aestheticise the misfortune of others, Franko B refuses to render

their situations palatable for a bourgeois audience. It imbues them with a poignancy that
enhances the solitary , ultimately tragic, nature of human ex istence. A s social documents

and formal compositions, the photographs parallel his painting and sculpture practice,

which contains the same ov erlap between the social significance of contemporary life
and formal arrangements.

Franko B has maintained his studio practice from the beginning of his more widely

presented performance work. He v entured into two dimensions with his early collages,
but his association of blood with beauty in painting came to the forefront in pieces made

from the cotton wipes left ov er from the aftermath of his performances. There are three
archety pal images that Franko B returns to again and again and, in a sense, these sum up

his position as an artist. They are the figure of a man, the heart, and the cross. The man

figure appears face on, reduced to the rudimentary human shape of round head, hanging
arms with no hands, straight legs with no feet; characterless, featureless but, nonetheless,

the primal, unmistakeable shape of original man. The heart is in the classic shape, a ‘lov e
heart’. The cross, the sy mbol of the Red Cross with its equal arms, is redolent of Franko

B’s y oung life in institutional care. In the tripty ch Man-Heart-Cross these three potent

images stand side by side before the spectator, resolutely asserting the life and truth of
Franko B’s ex perience. The images are made in his blood. The surface of each panel is

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made up of hundreds of baby soft wipes, each one used to clean up the traces of his

bleeding after performances. They are retained, dried and catalogued, so that the density
of blood on each one can be jux taposed with another in order that the lights and darks of

the brown dried blood create the tones that form the images. In a smaller work, For Kris,
Franko B’s emotional force is clearly directed through the fundamental substance of

corporeal life towards the object of his lov e. The softness of the surface and the basic
matter of his ‘paint’ combine with the simplicity of the title to ev oke a most powerful

statement about the intensity of interpersonal relationships. Still Life from the same

series attempts no figurativ e association. The simplicity of the softness and the blood
establish a reinv igorated potency and relev ance for the orthodox banality of the work’s

title. Franko B has commented on his use of the term ‘still life,’ in relation to his
photographs discussed abov e. The phrase relates to

the notion of ‘still life’, from a range of formal and conceptual perspectiv es; the ‘still life’

of fine art traditions, the ‘still life’ of the body as sculpture, the ‘still life’ of sleep and the
‘still life’ of a life that seems to go nowhere.

Blood became such an essential component of Franko B’s work that by this time he was

regularly bloodletting and preserv ing it, for use as a more conv entional tool, almost as
paint from a tube might be employ ed. In works such as Bleeding Heart and My House Has

Been Broken Into, the image of the heart is placed on the field of soft wipes, and the

v ertical bloodlines from performances of Oh Lov er Boy hav e been cut and collaged into
the shapes of represented in the paintings. The works ex ist independently from the

performances, at a remov e from the liv e process.

As Franko B continued to dev elop these two-dimensional works, he ex plored the streets

of East London gathering objects and taking them back to his studio: bits of furniture,
religious artefacts, old toy s, shoes, and any thing else that caught his ey e or held

significance for him. Once back in his studio, he would alter the pieces he had rescued
from the dump, bandaging them in bloodied canv as. These processes act as a form of

nurturing, thereby creating a new identity for these useless, discarded, rejected sy mbols
of a throwaway culture. In Franko B’s hands, this rubbish is giv en a new life. It is healed

and protected and reintroduced to the world with a new worth. These pale sculptural

forms emerge from Franko B’s fostering to be marked with his blood that appears to hav e
is spray ed on them in a sy mbolic act of identification and embrace. A s his collection of

objects grew, Franko B returned to his process of cataloguing. He searched for discarded
shelv ing sy stems, bandaging them in the same way as the objects. On these shelv es he

was able to elaborate his ideas of collage, the association of images and objects, by

placing different objects in v ary ing combinations and open-ended narrativ e
relationships. Alongside pieces of bandaged furniture, large free-standing objects were

each aesthetically linked with the others through a similarity of surface. A concoction of
forms jostled for position in the confined space of his studio.

For sev eral y ears, Franko B has been ex perimenting with intimate room installations, in
which he would bring together earlier groups of objects to create tableau v iv ants. In

2001 at the Home Gallery in London, he created a complete bedroom, complete with
rack of clothes, bed, chairs, soft furnishings and personal effects, all cov ered or

fabricated out of white canv as spattered with blood. In 2004, he repeated the
ex periment again in London at the Great Eastern Hotel. This time the installation was

more elaborate, the range of objects much greater and more div erse. The inner logic of

the domestic interior was ex panded into a surreal world that incorporated Franko B’s
shelv ing sy stems in an association of objects that cohered in the setting of the room and

en suite bathroom. The usual furnishings were in place but their function ex tended to
include the open-ended narrativ e of the rescued artefacts. On the coffee table sat a tea

set, on the wall behind the sofa hung a painting. A nother hung abov e the desk with its

illuminated lamp. A bowl of fruit sat on the table, the bed was made, the bed lights turned
on. The room was empty , it ex uded a quiet atmosphere ready for its occupant to arriv e

and relax . This peaceful mood was established in part by the whiteness of the bandaged
canv as surfaces that cov ered ev ery thing. The room was v irtually monochromatic,

ex quisitely tasteful in all but for the fact that ev ery surface was stained in the artist’s

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ex quisitely tasteful in all but for the fact that ev ery surface was stained in the artist’s

blood. The centre of the sofa was cov ered in blood, the fruit, the tea set, all the clothes,
ev ery thing, had its coalesced coating. But this bizarre theatricality was not macabre but,

rather, contributed to the beauty of the scene. This was not the supposed site of some
grisly murder. Any literal reading of the installation triv ialises Franko B’s intention,

which accentuated the crossov er between the illusion of stability that underpins

bourgeois ex istence and the tragic condition of life.

Methodically , Franko B has worked through his obsessions. Maintaining his liv e actions
in performance, but under much tighter control, he has gradually begun to limit the

amount of bloodletting he undergoes. He started making the bandaged shelf sy stems

without bloodstains, and subsequently painted the objects in bright colours. The open
association of forms was enhanced by an equally open combination of colours painted in

impasto acry lic paint.

Although Franko B has consistently worked in two dimensions, the actual act of painting

was something that he was reticent to return to. He painted as a student, but in later
y ears his practice had mov ed him away from the discipline. His engagement with

sculpture and installation, howev er, placed him on a trajectory that refocused his
attention upon the ex ternal act of producing art rather than rely ing on the inner

resources of his own body . A s discussed earlier, Franko B has alway s had an awareness of

colour and surface. In his performances the white pigment and the red blood combine in
that relationship and this dev eloped as he worked with objects. Once he ex punged his

blood from the objects, howev er, the contex tual relationship between their original state
and the final bandaged one ceased to hav e the same relev ance. He asserted colour and

paint themselv es as the fundamental material through which he chose to ex press is ideas
and feelings.

In 2004, Franko B started discussions with Giampaolo A bbondio, the Director of Galleria
Pack in Milan. They spoke about the possibility of Galleria Pack mounting an ex hibition of

Franko B’s work. A ction 398 was first performed a few streets away from the gallery ,

though Abbondio was more interested in presenting other aspects of Franko B’s practice
to the Milan audience. Galleria Pack had plenty of space, and with the entire contents of

Franko B’s studio shipped from London there were still two rooms that could be utilised.
Keeping his colours pure and his palette restrained to a max imum of two or three, he

worked on a large series of heav y circular wooden panels. Central to these paintings is
the repetition of those motifs that sy mbolise his ex pressiv e life; the cross, the man, the

heart. Gradually the bright colours hav e giv en away to black monochromes with a single

impasto image. Lost in Space shows the head and shoulders of a human figure, seemingly
looking out from the surface of the painting and standing in front of a huge black cross.

The figure reappears in Night with a black moon behind his left shoulder. The black moon
sheds no light and although the faces of the man figures nev er depict any features, it

seems as though he faces us, rather than looking away . The man figure appears alone, as a
pair or a threesome. The black (red) cross dominates and occasionally the monochrome

theme is broken, as the man appears made flesh.

In his 2004 ex hibition at Galleria Pack, Franko B made a life size model of himself. It

stands naked on the gallery floor, a perfect replica of the artist but without a cov ering of
white pigment nor with his tattoos and scars. It is the figure of a new man, for since its

display , blood has not appeared in Franko B’s object-based work. He is facing a wall

cov ered in a regular arrangement of small round paintings, each depicting the flesh
coloured head and shoulders of the man figure. A red gash appears on almost all of the

bodies, recurring like memories from a past life. It is as if Franko B has transferred the
signs from the surface of his own body onto the surface of the paintings, and he stands in

front of them contemplating their meaning and their relationship to his ex istence, the
human body and the beauty that is bound up with its inner frailty . Most recently , the

circular panels hav e been superseded by rectangles. In a new series of black paintings,

Franko B has drawn portraits in impasto on matt surfaces or reproduced images taken
from photographs that deal with world ev ents.

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In A ktion 398, first performed in Milan in 1 998, Franko encountered audience members
indiv idually , in a small room inside a gallery . The remaining audience sat together in a

waiting room, each hav ing taken a numbered ticket from a dispenser attached to the

gallery wall. A s their number appeared on a digital screen each indiv idual would enter
the room on their own. Once inside, each was confronted by the artist, naked with his

head and body cov ered in white pigment. A round his neck was a large plastic collar of the
kind that animals wear to prev ent them from licking their wounds. In the side of his

stomach was a light cut bleeding quietly , the red blood trickling down his side across the
white surface of his body . Each person could stay in the room with Franko B for up to

three minutes. It was an intimate ex perience in which the potential for contemplation

was heightened by the ex treme, one to one, relationship between artist and spectator.
Mov ing further away from himself as the focus of his liv e work, his latest liv e action is an

inv itation to his audience to remov e their clothes. In A ktion 893 (Why A re Y ou Here?)
Franko B meets members of his audience, one to one, in an empty room. On this

occasion, howev er, it is he who is clothed and they who are naked. The work comprises of

an ex change, a conv ersation that takes place between them. It usually consists of an
ex ploration of his audience’s motiv es for their participation, enacting a shift of emphasis

that prioritises the audience ov er the artist. Recently , when Franko B performed the
piece in Cork, Ireland, this ex change took place with ov er forty people ov er a fourteen-

hour period. The title and structure of A ction 893 are a rev ersal of Action 398, the work
first performed in Milan. A s the publicity for the work announces, ‘Franko B will enter the

room fully clothed. Please note that y ou are required to be naked for this one-to-one

encounter.’ This simple description of the process is redolent with the implications of this
work. The meeting room is white with the windows blacked out. There are two chairs

facing each other, and the participant is inv ited to sit on one, Franko B on the other.
Franko B begins a ten-minute conv ersation by asking “Why are y ou here?” It is a simple

question but one that requires a degree of honesty between the two participants, that is

accentuated by the circumstances of their ex perience together. It is a potentially

cathartic moment, as the trust necessary between artist and participant – and the
courage required to rev eal oneself in an alien contex t that ex poses one’s v ulnerability –

is transposed into negotiations that cannot av oid an uncertain acknowledgement of

sex ual and power relations.

The dev elopment of Franko B’s practice has incorporated a spectrum of ideas and media
that appear repeatedly , in different combinations throughout his performance, painting,

and sculpture practice. Nonetheless, they nev er stray far from one essential state of

consciousness that epitomises Franko B’s practice. It is an affirmation based on the
unorthodox y of his distinctiv e character, and on his ability to transcend the personal to

embrace the univ ersal through the emblematic language he has created.

Franko B, ‘I Feel E mpty’ in L I V E : A rt and P erformanc e. London, T ate, 2 0 0 4 .
S arah Wils on, ‘Franko B: H aute S urveillanc e, H aute C outure’ in O h L over Boy, Blac k D og P ublis hing, 2 0 0 1
Franko B in c onvers ation with G ray Wats on, O h L over Boy, Blac k D og P ublis hing, 2 0 0 1

www.glbtq.c om
www.franko- b.c om/gallery

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