Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present Il continente buio, the second solo show of Alice Faloretti (Brescia, 1992) at the gallery, with a new body of works which includes oil paintings on canvas and paper as well as pencil drawings. The project takes its title from the essay by Francesco Sauro, in which the speleologist describes caves, grottos and underground mysteries.
The concept of landscape moves beyond the imagery encouraged by the pictorial research of the past, which began to establish itself as an autonomous artistic genre in Western art only during the 17th century. Landscape painting was affected by the Academic prejudice, being classified as a minor genre, although it was well appreciated among collectors and art connoisseurs. Faloretti embraces this subject-object by translating an expression of the mind into painting and representing an emblematic container full of multiple meanings. We get into the human mind, rather than into geological variations of nature.
The cave plays an ambivalent role: a time capsule which freezes the flow of centuries and keeps fossils, traces, footprints, drawings, objects, but also an archive surrounded by absolute darkness. Beyond the threshold, darkness and silence change our perception of reality, encouraging us to move away from the paradigms by which we live and survive in the outside world. Our sight is reduced, our hearing is intensified, we rely on our sense of touch to move and explore the darkness. We move towards the unknown and what should protect us and give us confidence, when reached, takes us into a parallel dimension: protection and anguish.
Faloretti wants to create an alternative dimension, capable of recalling ancestral and primordial images, both near and far from our reality. These visions are made up by ambiguous, hidden and revealed forms full of possibilities yet to be discovered: an unfamiliar place but in which to find something familiar and from which to leave for other destinations.