The artist's poetics is inspired by some lines of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem The Cloud in Trousers: (1914-15) “Look! They have decapitated the stars again / and bloodied the sky like a slaughterhouse.”
Irregularly shaped decapitated stars, long, narrow nails, black shapes wandering aimlessly. Franco Ionda's iconographic universe was born from a crucial reflection in his own vision and from constant research on highly topical themes: the drama of migrants, of war, of prisoners, of veterans, of mothers in border territories. The artist reacts to the lack of identity and solid references of today's humanity through a dense repertoire of forms, literary quotes, historical connections of inventions, which serve to shake souls, always underlining the centrality of man and the sacredness of life. Franco Ionda's works place emphasis on the itinerant character of all humanity, which has now abandoned sedentary living, and finds itself in the unfolding of a path where the stars and nails almost refer to a Dante's journey, with the straight path lost, but to paraphrase the last verse of the “Divina Commedia”, moved by nothing other than love.
The artist's poetics is inspired by some lines of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem The Cloud in Trousers: (1914-15) “Look! They have decapitated the stars again / and bloodied the sky like a slaughterhouse." It is a powerful metaphor on which the artist builds a range of original inventions which find their most complete symbolic expression in the decapitated stars. Made of aluminium, these fallen and broken stars participate in the denunciation and redemption of humanity together with masses of long and sharp nails, as can be seen in the works “Eccoci”, “Esto Urlo” and “Con gli occhi chiusi...Si Risorge”, and above all with a series of black silhouettes, a universal message that goes beyond individual historical events, as in “La Storia di Jeff.” However, in Ionda's art darkness is never without hope: the stars are somehow relaunched into the sky, precisely with the intention that they can return to illuminate the night.
