Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present FRANCIS DiFRONZO: WESTERN FRONT, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition of paintings by the Southern California-based artist. Western Front continues DiFronzo’s contemplation of what the future of humanity looks like. The exhibition opens with a reception on March 29th and continues through April 24th.
DiFronzo’s highly detailed paintings depict imagined landscapes inspired by his travels through the California desert and memories of childhood road trips in the family station wagon. His hauntingly beautiful paintings alternate between reality and the surreal as they present desolate and mysterious places reminiscent of the iconic American West. The paintings are meticulously painted and wander from familiar and mundane to the surreal.
Fundamentally a storyteller, DiFronzo transports the viewer into a world of his own creation. As one moves from painting to painting across DiFronzo’s oeuvre, the viewer vicariously experiences the depth and breadth of a world full of stories that DiFronzo has conjured into being.
There is an elegance and refinement to the mark-making in these paintings. Often spare in their compositions, the paintings rarely contain more than a few subjects: sky, earth, creosote or arrowweed bushes, and some evidence of past or present human existence in the form of an abandoned car, a solitary structure, or a rail car. DiFronzo is illustrating the story, or perhaps premonition, of what might become of humanity, and what we unintentionally would leave behind.
While using some precepts of American Scene Painting (romanticism in depicting everyday life, depictions of cities, small towns, and rural landscapes as a return to a simpler life away from industrialization, or to make a political statement in support of revolutionary and radical causes), DiFronzo is pushing his work into nuanced, contemporary territory. Unlike the American Scene Painters, DiFronzo is not depicting a simpler time, he is illuminating a post-apocalyptic world in which the fallout of today’s societal decisions have come to bear on the landscape. The view is harsh but beautiful in its melancholy.
FRANCIS DiFRONZO (b. 1969, San Pedro, CA) received his BFA from the University of California, Fullerton, in 1994 and his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1996. DiFronzo’s painting have been exhibited throughout the United States and are included in numerous private collections. His works have been published in American Art Collector, Western Art & Architecture, and Fine Art Connoisseur, among others. He has been awarded several prestigious grants including the Stobbart Foundation Fellowship in the Arts in 1998 and the Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2004. He lives and works in Irvine, CA.
