Francesco Sanfilippo - Ponte d'oro

The golden bridge created by Sanfilippo is a painting on a panel, 100 × 100 cm, in which the painting is structured as a mental and emotional map. The abstract composition evokes an organic fabric, a direct allusion to the morphology of the city of Venice, a place where the artist has long resided and a fundamental matrix of his research.
On the panel there are gold leaf and crushed iridescent shells, incorporated into the paint medium: materials that amplify the surface’s luminous vibration and establish a tactile and symbolic dialogue with the lagoon dimension. Gold captures and refracts light, while the mother-of-pearl fragments evoke the living matter of water and its stratifications.
The image does not describe, but evokes: from memory emerges a fragment of the lagoon city seen from above, reorganized according to an organic and pulsating principle. The pictorial surface behaves like a living organism, in which oranges, blacks, blues, golden yellow and ochres build a dense and stratified chromatic rhythm, evocative of a lived time, of a collective and festive experience that traverses fields, calli and canals.
At the center of the composition stands the golden bridge, a sign in gold that is essential and symbolic, which takes on the value of an archetype: an element of connection, passage, and relation, capable of uniting spaces, times, and emotional dimensions that seem to be apart. The bridge thus becomes the visual and conceptual hub of the work, a place of tension and synthesis.
The artist performs a transfiguration of memory, transforming recollection into painterly matter. Color, gold, and matter do not illustrate, but activate an emotional resonance that restores a moment of joyful life, filtered through time and brought back to a universal dimension. The painting seeks an auspicious harmony between architecture and nature: between the built structure of the bridge and the organic vitality of the urban and lagoonal fabric, in a balance that becomes both visual and symbolic. On the back of the panel is the certificate of authenticity; the artist's signature is located at the bottom right.