Filippo Francocci (Italian-South African, b. 1974) is a painter and digital artist who works in what he calls surreal abstract figuration, blending surrealist automatism and abstract-expressionist pouring and dripping techniques with paint or digital media. He suppresses conscious control at the start of each piece to let chance and the subconscious reveal hidden forms, which he then shapes and develops into a finished narrative.
Born in Città di Castello, Italy, he moved to South Africa at the age of two and grew up there, earning a BA in Fine Arts from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1998. He received the Standard Bank Fine Arts Prize for the graduating student who showed the most progress as an undergraduate. After painting for backdrop and interior decorating companies in South Africa, London and Rome, he moved to Europe in 1999, where he continued painting and worked as a teacher. He lives and works on the Costa Brava in Spain.
As an Italian South African, he traces his artistic perspective to the fusion of Western and African art and cultures he encountered growing up, along with the natural environments that surrounded him. He is drawn to self-similar structures in nature, noting how the branching of trees echoes the nervous system or an aerial view of a river. He plays with this shift in scale so that the same image might read as a landscape to one viewer and a microscopic organism to another.Since the early 2020s he has extended this practice into artificial intelligence, training AI models on his own paintings and using the outputs to make digital collages or as the starting point for new physical paintings.
In 2022 he exhibited an NFT on digital screens through Artcrush Gallery at Art Basel Miami, and in 2023 his work appeared in the group show “Let Art Be” at Lezar House Gallery in Barcelona.In October 2024 he was one of more than 60 artists included in Fakewhale's “ART MARKET Day” on objkt.com.His work is available across several NFT platforms, including Foundation, KnownOrigin, objkt, Teia and OpenSea.
