Recent work: Pictures at an Exhibition (apologies to Mussorgsky) with selected works from the 80’s and 90’s
- Francis Giacco

“There is … a distinct tension between Giacco’s practice of painting and the subject-matter that has been so important in some of his most memorable works. His artistic culture, highly refined and with its inspiration in the poetic lucidity of Sienese or Flemish painting of the early Renaissance, is in almost all respects completely alien to the earthy materiality of Calabrian life, barely changing for centuries, remote from any of the intellectual or spiritual ideas that have occupied the western mind from the early modern period to the present day. And yet for that very reason, he had to face and come to terms with that dark ancient heritage, and on the members of his family who were its living representatives.

In his more recent paintings, Giacco still uses family members as subjects, but now the sitters are his daughters, educated and artistic young women with university degrees, who have been raised in his world of aesthetic culture; these girls, twins, appear as infants on the lower right of Family portrait, but have grown far from the intense and inarticulate world of that painting. And that is perhaps why the most recent pictures are imbued with a new kind of serenity and peace, in which Giacco is able to meditate on the qualities of visual phenomena without being burdened by moral and existential anxieties: to ponder the mutability of light, the ambiguities of figure and ground, and the inexhaustible pleasure, mystery and elusiveness of a world of appearances that can never be objectively known or definitively captured. “

Christopher Allen, 2023

National Art Critic, The Australian