Franco Cuttica’s work has an undeniable connection to nature.

Just as wood floats down the river and trails from coast to coast, Franco Cuttica embraces a fluid vision of art. Throughout his cosmopolitan career, he has painstakingly developed pieces on a monumental scale, exploring subject matter from horses to the elements. His work in different mediums and themes challenges him to defy limits and appreciate the adventure of the artistic process.

At the age of 6, his family emigrated to the US from Argentina. After attending various schools in New York City, he moved to East Hampton in order to attend Ross School. This unique school, governed by principles of Zen Buddhism, sits in a forest at the east end of Long Island. Franco’s intense contact with nature from a young age serves as the impetus for all of his work.

Franco works in a variety of mediums, in which he seeks to express the cycles of nature and what he calls “the flat circularity of time.” In his “Driftwood” series, Franco intercepts pieces of nature in their journeys around the globe. Wood that has traveled across the ocean from far-flung corners of the world arrives on a beach in Long Island, at which point Franco blends these fragments of various locales into magnificent horse sculptures, simultaneously capturing the mobility of nature and the influence of man.

In this series, Franco conducts a thorough search for driftwood through methods such as Google Earth to help find the materials he needs. As if looking for a needle in a haystack, he locates pieces of driftwood from a bird’s eye view. This search, much like the work itself, emphasizes the interplay between the particular and the global. After sourcing the wood, Franco begins the journey itself. He collects the material and begins working on the preparation, modeling, and assembly. Every part must fit like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle.

Finally, Franco sets fire to his own creation.  Part theater, part process, this stage involves burning the driftwood sculpture from within and putting out the fire with water. By way of this “cleansing,” the work emerges renewed. As he puts it, "the object thus rises from its ashes and takes on a new dimension."

Today, Franco lives and works at his family’s artistic compound, Campo Cuttica, in Flanders, New York. Beyond Long Island, he has completed residencies in Ishikawa, Japan and Mendoza, Argentina and recently finished a commission for the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah. His work has appeared in private and public collections across the United States, in places such as the Hamptons, Miami, and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.  He has also been featured in several major publications, including Vogue, Cultured Magazine, and Behind the Hedges.