Franco Gobbi

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It is interesting how an individual’s perspective on an everyday situation can lay bare his or her singular take on the world. Take a woman’s visit to the hair salon. For some it is a once a month treat – an excuse for a big night out; for others it is a daily grooming necessity or part of their work armouring. In ‘Das Dreißigste Jahr’ (The Thirtieth Year), Ingeborg Bachmann presents a moving literary account of one woman’s visits to the salon as dashed opportunities for the butterfly-like transformation the protagonist is so desperate for as she leaves her youth behind. Perhaps a male perspective would inevitably be wildly different but to hair guru Franco Gobbi – whose career is shaped around simultaneously amplifying a woman’s beauty and her hair – such a bleak view would be anathema.
It was actually his first visit to a hair salon with his mother at the age of 14 year that ignited his interest in becoming a hair stylist. He found that the air was as thick with the sparkle of female camaraderie, uninhibited by male company, as it was with hairspray. “I was keeping place for my mum and found it fascinating being around women who were being themselves with no men around. Now I’m grown up I realise it was because I believe in an archaic religion where woman is god,” he explains. “I believe women are the only creatures who can create life – there’s a strong connection with nature – that’s why I think she is God.”
The sculptural shapes he has created for style bibles such as French Vogue and iD, advertising campaigns for Roberto Cavalli and Sportmax and photographic exhibitions with Araki and Nan Goldin (think tendrils crafted into rose blooms, halos of candyfloss fuzz, dressage-worthy sleek ponytails) are all designed to emphasise a woman’s innate sensuality.
“It is about working with shapes with an organic texture,” explains Gobbi. “I like to build crazy shapes and textures so it is never too stiff or solid. You need to make women feel the hair is floating in the air without any force.”
Gobbi has had an interesting career. Starting out as a hair stylist for Italian television shows, his work caught the eye of leading art photographers Nan Goldin and Araki early on and, despite his many commercial successes, Gobbi has always approached his work with the mentality of an artist, prompted to create by an emotional reaction to something he has seen or done. “The fashion shows and editorial are a political thing,” he states. “They don’t really turn me on.”
Inspired primarily by the Fellini films created in Rimini, the birthplace he shares with the iconic director, and darker David Lynch cinematography (“the two don’t really work together but they make what I am visually – over theatrical and spooky”), a crucial part of Gobbi’s work is about fuelling his creative engine. “I used to go to the Venice biennale every year. I like a lot of photography art and video installation. I get inspired by the emotions that I feel when I see good art.”
The times when he has had space to play, experiment, test out new ideas seem to be the times when he has cranked his work up a gear.  “Moving to Paris from Milan was a turning point for me,” says Gobbi. “I felt free. That’s when I started experimenting, fucking around with hair, burning things. Sometimes I went a bit OTT with my own problems.”
Now based in New York, Gobbi’s bedroom experiments have matured and he is getting ready to unleash his unique vision of women’s beauty on the world through his upcoming ‘Fragile’ book and exhibition. The book, featuring a raft of class A models such as Karen Elson will focus on the beauty of hair with Gobbi turning photographer to offer his specialist’s take. “Usually in photographs all you see if the photographer’s vision. This book is about the perspective of people who make hair.”
The exhibition, planned for early 2011 in New York, is more abstract, featuring blurred photographic representations of equally high calibre models. Like Mulholland Drive or Blue Velvet, the resulting beauty has an eerie quality. “It focuses on the connection between women’s hurt and fragility. If you take her into a place that is dangerous for her, the reaction is quite extreme and I wanted to capture that idea that when something breaks it is not fixable,” he explains.
He achieves this by using a long exposure to give a “dragging feeling so the image flows.” There are no clothes or accessories, giving sole importance to the emotional movement. After retouching, each image is printed on plexiglass (a not especially eco-friendly material) so that breaks or scratches in the material are highlighted.
How does he hope his audience will respond? “I want to provoke them.” We think he will.

For details of the opening dates and venue of ‘Fragile’ visit  http://www.myspace.com/francogobbi