Franco Mulas

Franco Mulas (Rome, 1938). Mulas is a contemporary Italian painter. He studied painting at the French Academy in Rome and at the School of Ornamental Art of the Municipality of Rome. His first personal exhibition dates back to 1967: paintings on the city in its aspects of alienating well-being, Sunday highways, weekends. While entering the trend of objective figuration, Mulas possesses an unmistakable language: he is fascinated by the metamorphosis and the enigmatic quality of color. 

In 1972, at the Galleria "Forni" in Bologna, with a presentation by Franco Solmi, Mulas proposes the results of a reflection on the violence that permeates society and which is raised in the private, in everyday life, to which one is tamed as a game, in general indifference. With five works from this series, Mulas is invited to the 10th Quadrennial in Rome in 1973. 

In 1974 Mulas exhibited in Rome at the "La Nuova Pesa" Gallery and then in 1975 in Florence at the "Santacroce" Gallery with a presentation by Fortunato Bellonzi and finally at Turin at the “Ricerche” Gallery, with a presentation by Antonio Del Guercio, 25 paintings entitled: Itineraries; and here the pictorial controversy with Hyperrealism and Body Art, prevailing in those years, is extremely violent. To sanction a turning point in Mulas' production is the participation in the XXXIX Venice Biennale of 1980, in the Architecture section with the GRAU, presenting the sequence of 4 paintings, The Red Tree by Mondrian, 1979. The same series is presented at the Prove exhibition by Authors, Pinacoteca Comunale, Ravenna January-March 1980. 

In the catalog of the Venice Biennale, the GRAU explains how for Mulas it is a critique of the roots of the Modern Movement - a critique conducted, also by the group of architects - with a backward path to the reconquest of the pictorial (and not absolute) space and of a natural history. His works are the result of a patient work of pictorial and luministic 'construction', where images emerge from distant places. The events merge and are brought to light through a dense intertwining of ramifications of past memories.