Capturing the limitless, experiential character of the urban fabric, Joseph Franza’s work explores our relationship with the built environment. By recontextualizing architecture into sculptural abstractions, he creates an altered state of visual perception that challenges our patterns of sensory stimuli.   

 

The compositions, unaltered and unfiltered, are taken spontaneously, looking up from ground level, reframing what we see with the sky -blue, gray or dark night- as an infinite canvas and a shared point of spatial reference in all the works.  By deconstructing building façades -whether in Europe, the Middle East or South and North America- they transcend both geography and the built structure, and become a fragmented landscape or an abstract form that we no longer interpret as a building. Extrapolating those underlying, often sensuous, forms in a new field of vision liberates our impression of what the built environment is, venerates what exists beneath the surface, and ultimately expands our notion of what we perceive as we move through the world.

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Franza’s work invites us to reconsider what we think we see in a new way, reframing -with the precision of origami- built objects into expansive compositions that become sculptural, and vibrate with an energetic presence. The work allows us to shift our gaze as well as our thinking, and to reconsider our relationship with the constructed environment that surrounds us in an exalted and dynamic context.