Giancarlo Franco Tramontin

Giancarlo Franco Tramontin was born in Venice in 1931. Considered one of the most successful sculptors in the city, Tramontin has created contemporary works while maintaining a strong link with ancient poetry. Student of Alberto Viani, he trained as a sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice; he became Viani’s assistant in 1978, and then succeeded him in his Chair for the following forty years. His apprenticeship under Maestro Viani and the development of his own line soon led the artist to establish himself also outside the Venetian territory.

From the 1950s, his works were exhibited in important solo and collective exhibitions, in Italy and abroad, obtaining prizes and awards at the most prestigious national and international exhibitions. During his student years at the Academy of Fine Arts, he met Ester Parata, who would become the companion of a life and the inspiring muse of his work.

Chemist by training but with a lively interest in archeology, Ester contributed to his research on the material rendering, especially during his first artistic experiences, when Tramontin loved to experiment with various solutions on different supports. Absolute theme in the works of Giancarlo Franco Tramontin is the presence of the human body. A body that is constantly reinterpreted and stylized through the use of different materials, ranging from Carrara marble to wood, up to shiny or burnished bronze.

The work and the materials used create a connection with the surrounding space that soothe the static nature of the creation forming a sinuous movement effect. Tramontin, obsessed with the body, in particular the female one, pursues his own abstraction dense with a very fine sensitivity for surfaces that reflect an evolving light.

In 1956 he won a scholarship from the Ministry of Education which brought him to Greece, a significant place for his artistic growth. Tramontin’s sculptures evoke sinuous female bodies that, gently caressed, flex enfolding the surrounding space. In the artist there is a strenuous search for the pure lines of the female body, a model that infinitely traces and investigates until the sublimation of matter. The result speaks of an artistic and intellectual synthesis. The bodies of the headless figures contract and become thinner in clean, essential forms.

The unstoppable research led him to approach artists and intellectuals, among whom the figures of Sergio Bettini and Dino Formaggio, Alberto Viani and Arturo Martini stand out. From the comparison with his masters, Tramontin offers a positive vision of his work, far from the fleeting aesthetic of fashion, with the use of a language destined to last over time, always current and updated.

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