Italian artist Franco Cervi lives and works in Milan, Italy. For over ten years he worked with the studios Sottsass Associati and Matteo Thun & Partners. In 2006 he founded the publishing company 279 Editions, after which he began his own artistic practice.

His work has a philosophical approach and looks to the foundations of existential thought and represents the desire to decode; the attempt at the genetic mapping of the infinite.

On a formal level, the choice of radical minimalism is based on the rigour of Pythagorean and Platonic geometries. The pursuit of perfect proportion and absolute harmony depend on interactions between subject and space that are mathematically exact; as a result, the first cannot be situated in positions different from those given, just as it cannot take on different dimensions or proportions, Cervi explains.

An identical rigour applies to colour tones, when they are present, which are initially selected with the sole logic of generating optical contrast; only later can they take on meaning in relation to each other.

Cervi’s work often springs from a written element, a key word that sums up the meaning and at the same time becomes its caption.