RIVER_English version

River2002©Franck, charcoal, graphite B4, B 0.5, pastels on smooth, paper champagne 30x45.

I loved River's expressive power. 
I remember me exulting at his achievement of Coppa Volpi for best male actor in the Venice Film Festival, in 1991. I remember too me standing off the only cinema in Rome where they showed "Handsome and Damned" - free invented title for "My Own Private Idaho" by Gus Van Sant - because it was censured under 14 in Italy. 
The time I could have seen my River on big screen, instead of on TV always interrupted by irritating adds, all faded away because of one "No". 
Still today he is alive in front of my eyes in the most powerful scenes from "Running on Empty" "Little Nikita" "Mosquito Coast", but above all in the role of Devo in "I love you till death". 
Studying his features, I was wondering whether River might finally personify on the screen my favorite poet - Arthur Rimbaud. 
Then the dark. One ridiculous festivity, one complete loss of Love and Respect for life - October 31st, 1993. 
For me, as well as for my sister and millions of cinephiles all over the world, that day was definitely shocking - Federico Fellini. You could perceive the upsetting around Rome, in a bright Roman, Summer-like October. 
River's disappearance on a pavement of Sunset Boulevard, here in Italy, passed as when you drop a glass of water into the sea. 
Then I realized how much relativeness there was, even in the disappearance of one person with huge potential, unique in style, so strong to magnetize the interest from different cultures and nations. 
River was an equation left undone at the solution. 
Only after, show-biz logic understood that a part of the puzzle missed - they started on tearing out copies, cropping substitutions of value to make them collimate, the void left by River underlined even more the feeling of waste. 
I remember finding one year later "My Own Private Idaho" VHS and one little biography by Brian J. Robb, "River Phoenix : a short life", in London. In its pages, there were wonderful photos of River, since the beginnings till the last movies. 
It happened something special during the Red Hot Chili Peppers Concert in Rome, February 2002. I saw in a wallpaper one young man running on a dark street and the falling down, while they were playing "Don't Forget me". He looked like River, and I called him aloud at the end of the song, together with my sister. After the show, coming back home, we passed in Piazza del Popolo. It was dark, no-one was around. I left some money to the Indian asleep in the stand of flower and took a white rose for River. I left on the step of the monument under the stele.
Eventually, August 15th 2002, I decided to portray River. Some years afterwards, his filmography helped me to write my thesis at University about "Young Rebel - about cinema, culture and literature from the '50s until 2005". 

I chose the shot from my favorite movie by Gus Van Sant "My Own Private Idaho", just as his character is furious and helpless, holding in his hand one sunflower. The scene of Bob's funeral, the Psychedelic Master, the Falstaff of that community of street kids. 
In love with the last Summer Sun, that flower cannot set its being free from that absolute, flaming star, which  gives away life and death at the same time; it looks like the sun and follows until the end of day, forgetting itself. 
River Phoenix' glance caught me, because I had always seen that way - oblique, furious, amused, bitter but with a rare intensity, as when the light cuts through one shaped diamond. 

I drew in graphite B4, charcoal the chiaroscuro, then the details in graphite B 0.5. At the end, I stood still and I looked at it. That huge yellow corolle recalled at the mess of his hair - It was the life and it deserved to gain the right attention ... pastels told its light.