short biographical notes on the artist Franco Rinaldi
Born in 1954, Franco Rinaldi began dedicating himself to painting in the late 1970s, following a creative impulse that would grow into a personal, unmistakable, and deeply poetic visual language. Over the years, his research has unfolded through engraved signs, dreamlike visions, and a continuous dialogue with poetry—an element that accompanies and often inspires his work.
Throughout his career, he has presented numerous solo exhibitions, each revealing a different facet of his inner landscapes and imaginative worlds. Among the most significant are Woodcuts at the Sormani Library in Milan, with notes by Alda Merini and Ito Itaru; Beyond the Curtain of the Dream at the Tikkun Gallery in Milan, curated by Arturo Schwarz and Riccardo Barletta; The New Man Will Arrive at Primo’s Gallery in Brescia; In the Dream Gardens at the Piccolo Miglio of the Brescia Castle, curated by Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz; and Beyond the Look at the Diocesan Museum of Brescia, curated by Giuseppe Fusari.
His work has also reached the international stage: in 1992 he appeared in the catalog of The Artist and the Book in Twentieth-Century Italy, published by MoMA in New York—an important recognition of his contribution to the dialogue between visual art and the artist’s book.
Rinaldi has collaborated with prominent authors and publishers. He illustrated the cover of The Easy Life by Alda Merini (Bompiani, 1996) and Elogio della Cultura by Agostino Mantovani (MarcoSerraTarantola, 2014), and created numerous covers for CIRMiB in the Vita e Pensiero editions. His works also accompany several poetry books published by Pulcinoelefante and L’Obliquo, including Il mio oceano che dorme (1996), Fuochi fatui (1997), and The Vertical Horizon (2012).
The relationship between image and word finds one of its most complete expressions in Poetica – Images in Poetry, Poetry through Images, presented at Villa Mirabella in the Vittoriale degli Italiani, with texts by Agostino Mantovani and Giordano Bruno Guerri. At the Vittoriale he also curated The Journey of Ulysses, a dialogue between the poems of Gabriele d’Annunzio and his own works, exhibited from September 2022 to February 2023.
In 2024, the collection Segni incisi (1982–2020) was donated to the Ateneo di Scienze, Lettere e Arti di Brescia, acknowledging the depth and continuity of his graphic research.
In 2025, he received the Paul Harris Fellow recognition from Rotary Brescia Ovest for his artistic and cultural commitment. That same year, he presented the exhibition The Gaze Among Dreams at the Church of San Pietro during the Tignale Summer Festival.
A complete list of exhibitions can be found in the downloadable PDF available on the catalog page.
For further information about his works, please write to [email protected]
titl,Uno sguardo nel sogno,2025