Franco Angeli - Half Dollar

The work draws on a pop aesthetic in its use of sign elements and their serial repetition. Pop Art was born in the United States in the second half of the 20th century as an interest/critique by artists of the contemporary "consumer society." All expressions of Pop Art presuppose a sort of double bond with the world of consumerism and the mass media. On the one hand, the artwork is reduced to a mere consumer product, thanks to the use of advertising language in the works and their serial reproduction through mechanical processes. On the other, it is the advertising images and consumer goods themselves that become works of art, as the most genuine and truthful expression of the new society.

This work is part of Franco Angeli's celebrated series featuring images of the four-dollar coin. The inspiration behind this piece is strongly connected to pop art, where a blatant symbol of consumption is elevated to an artistic object. Implicit throughout his oeuvre is a reflection on seriality and mechanical processes, as the same image recurs multiple times, even in the same work (as in this case). But Angeli's interpretation of the brand, the symbol of consumerism, is pictorial, almost tainted by a composition that also seeks to be emotionally expressive.

Franco Angeli, a Roman painter born in 1935, was part of the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo starting in the 1960s. This group of painters, which also included Mario Schifano, met at the Caffè Rosati and shared an artistic language inspired by Pop Art but with a new sensibility also influenced by the experiments of American Abstract Expressionism. The use of symbols of consumer society, repeated serially, is distinctly Pop, but their pictorial interpretation, whether dirty or textured, or using gestural techniques like dripping, offers a new vision and a different reconfiguration.

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