Excerpted from World Without End: An Approach to the Works of Cianne Fragione

Bruce Nixon

Cianne Fragione is a painter and an assemblage artist, and she conducts herself in both mediums with originality and invention, a high level of facility, and unusual sensitivity to the intrinsic personality of each as a medium. Although we typically regard these two formats as distinct, even dissimilar, one significant aspect of Fragione’s practice has been her effort to find ways of unifying them into an effective, harmonious form, and then learning how to channel the lessons of these experiences throughout her work.

In doing so, the nature of Fragione’s constructive process has assumed certain traits that can be taken as characteristic: an instinct for art forms susceptible to exchange and combination, a reflection of the deep pleasure that Fragione takes in tactility, the rich textures of objects and the physicality of her materials; much of her work, even as a painter, makes use of her discovery that the process of integrating dissimilar forms will often reveal paths and openings between them, previously hidden, that enable her to insert personal and associative detail in visually distinctive ways; and, finally, her desire to make, an unusually powerful constructive instinct, that shows her absorption of a cultural heritage of building and fine craft, one in which she invests tremendous value. As Fragione continues to test the degree to which assemblage and painting will sustain mounting levels of combinative and formal interaction — what might be described as the inherent willingness of each medium to accept physical intervention from the other, summarized in Ritorno (2007) — she has acquired an immense practical and intuitive knowledge that spills into her other work, almost always with the effect of heightening its material capacities. Fragione’s tendency to press physical limits, regardless of the medium, can create unusually difficult material problems, and their solutions, for the most part, are experiential. They must be resolved in the give-and-take of the making process itself.

To begin an account of an artist’s work in a context of materials and artistic forms would seem deliberately contrary when the artist herself appears to be so open and generous with her content. Are there not more important subjects to address? Fragione’s affecting experiences, for instance, as an Italian American raised among Sicilian immigrants in a close-knit Italian neighborhood, and the traumas posed by the subsequent difficulties of assimilation?

Nay, not so. However much Fragione appears to heap her work with thematic potential, it is always the effect of the means through which she achieves her forms. The themes in her work, whatever they may be, do not distinguish themselves as discrete from the day-to-day life of the studio. Although the studio could not exist as it does without the imprint of the artist’s past, the studio is not merely a container of that past. Whenever we recognize what appear to be thematic substances in the work, it is because they are inseparable from the ways in which the artist operates as a maker: that is, “how” she makes.

Fragione’s habit of periodically gathering the scraps that have accumulated on the studio floor — a surprising variety of stuff — and then constructing collages of them, or fitting them into other works, may be no more than a powerful echo of her grandmother’s insistence upon never wasting anything, however slight, and her skill of making use. But it would be simplistic and misleading only to collect such correlations. Fragione’s processes are too individual, too intelligent, and far too complex to accept such reductive equivalencies. While she is resolving the material needs of a particular work in the studio, operating now as a mature artist, Fragione can, if she wishes, maintain a simultaneous discourse with the themes that matter most to her. Indeed, she may have no choice. And yet — even though one might speak fairly of the studio as an extension of the artist’s consciousness, or as a metaphor of it, the work is not a metaphor of the artist. She is its maker, the cause of the work. But the work is not her. It is a real, concrete, physical thing, and what we feel are its effects, which constitute our experience of the work. Let us have no confusion on that point. The studio is a world of things awaiting their moment of use. Or more precisely, the world is vast with things, and as they catch the artist’s eye, many of them may find their way into the studio, which is itself only a microcosm of the world.

By starting with Fragione’a deeply felt connection to materials, with her sense of how objects and materials will operate together as forms, in service to each other in the individual work, and with decision-making procedures at once reasoned and intuitive, we are in fact beginning at the most intimate level of Fragione’s process. In an artist so concerned with materials and their strength of effect, an understanding of her content must almost necessarily begin from this point. Construction is the source of formation. It enables us to see exactly how Fragione builds: how a guiding instinct for the satisfying actuality of things as simultaneously literal and meaningful allows her to embed dense, closely woven patterns and networks of information into painting, assemblage, and their combinations. We can now see Fragione’s arduous labor as a seemingly endless attention to the details whose cumulative effect is to imbue her work with the palpable atmosphere of a lived life.