BEHIND THE PAINTING
Profile
Barbara Frateschi was born in Turin, Italy, to a Florentine father and a mother from the Piedmont region. From an early age she moved home often and lived in various Italian cities including Rome and Florence, as well as in Paris, Morocco, along with New York where she enthusiastically discovered American painters.
Experience
She had been drawing for many years when she arrived in Geneva in 1983. Barbara Frateschi continued her path towards painting by taking academic classes at the School of Decorative Arts to help acquire speed in her sketching. In parallel, she took part in workshops taught by the international Swiss-American portrait specialist Gwenneth Barth-White, which helped her cultivate rigorous attention to detail. From the 1990s onwards, she became involved in watercolors. Under the tutelage of Marie-France Lafrance and Jean-Marie Borgeaud, Barbara Frateschi developed her skill in observational drawing and took up watercolors and gouache, that she transposes to oil and acrylic painting through a play on transparency and wash-paint. Fascinated by techniques that lead to free expression, she in particular attends workshops with the artist Anne de Mouctouris and Claude Muras.
Style
Barbara Frateschi loves to mix colors and to look for a dynamically balanced approach to shapes, sensations and colors. Experiencing a painting like a positive rebound, a renaissance, she conveys emotions through extremely free compositions transcending the border between abstraction and figuration. Barbara works with acrylics and oils around the theme of color evoking personal reminiscences of the glowing sunshine of Italy and Morocco, or of the leaden light over New York or Lake Geneva. She develops a simple relationship with painting in order to treat herself to some privileged moments. The association between the senses and her memories are rendered on canvas by a rich palette of colors that translate into “sensations” and draw inspiration from “places of memory”.
References
Certain creations by Barbara Frateschi are now part of private collections.