Niccolò Falaschi
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Apr 28
- 4 min read
Niccolò Falaschi starts with images, colors, and words. He puts them together in a way that feels precise but slightly unstable. He chooses his scenes carefully, but lets meaning stay open. Text doesn’t clarify the image. It shifts it sideways. What begins with balance often breaks apart mid-process. His earlier work held to silence and simplicity. Now the canvas holds more noise, more tension, more layered movement. The composition stays tight, even as everything inside it resists staying still.
Q: You pull in logos, film stills, and short phrases. What tells you an image is worth keeping?
A: Before starting the painting I carefully choose the images that I will paint; the choice falls on subjects often in the foreground, on well-balanced compositions and bright colors. There is no precise criterion, but only the punctum, as for Roland Barthes, that the specific image gives me—perhaps I have a predilection for close-up subjects and for clear, decisive, and vibrant colors. The image in the format of the close-up has a greater power in the viewer, especially if painted on large canvases. I spend a good part of my time choosing the right scene, which I can either keep natural or modify with Photoshop, inserting writings, details, and intersections of other figures. Having said that, for me the technique, although fundamental, is put in second place compared to the choice of the scene to paint; it may be a conceptual thought, but a large part of the message of the work on the public is given by what is portrayed.
Q: Painting started for you during lockdown. What made it stick?
A: The years of the pandemic certainly represent a turning point in my artistic production; 2020, with its downtime, made me rediscover drawing first and, later, painting—both activities that I had already practiced as a child.
The impossibility of fully communicating with the outside world made me understand how those artistic gestures have always been part of my daily life. Solitude gave a further push and an intention to make concrete what I had started.
Q: Text shows up a lot—floating, cut, painted over. How do you think about its role in the composition?
A: The word, the sentences, the text, have a very specific role within the composition: sometimes they support the message proposed by the subject, other times they change the meaning of the image proposed on the canvas. It is precisely this ambivalence of the word that gives it enormous importance in my works. A few letters can completely overturn the perception that the viewer has of the painting. This upheaval can open to personal interpretations—everyone can read the message they want. The association between scene and word generates ambiguities, which result in multiple visions perceptible by those who look at the work. A painting can represent an unexplored world for some and a familiar one for others. My interpretation becomes no longer a rule, but only a small suggestion offered to those who enjoy it. The viewer is free to grasp the meanings, more or less hidden, at his pleasure.
Q: You’ve referenced Burri’s tempera work. What kind of textures or colors are you chasing now?
A: Following a temporary exhibition of his abstract tempera paintings (made between the 1950s and the 1990s), I found a suggestion for composing my new works. The texture formed by the decomposition of shapes and colors, as if they were collages, is used by me to create a specific image: abstract art, characterized by shapes that do not refer to reality, becomes, following the process of optical reconstruction, figurative art. The eye, using the small shapes of color painted on the surface of the canvas, recreates the desired image.
Q: You’ve said meaning comes from how people look at the work. What kind of response makes you pause?
A: As already said in the previous question, the reaction of the public is multiple: some grasp the most superficial meaning of the painting, others the assonances that exist between the various parts of it, others still notice things that I had not even thought of at the beginning of the work, suggesting new ideas for thought. All reactions of those who view are welcome and for me a reason for further inspiration, as well as reinterpretation of my own work.
Q: Lately you’re moving away from your older approach. What’s starting to feel more important now?
A: My old works focused on the theme of solitude, representing single characters within monochromatic spaces—few colors that formed the main subject. Currently, my interest includes the combination between the image and the word, between the different shapes and the countless shades of colors. From the "naked" scene of the old projects, I have now moved on to the chaos that these elements unfold in the square surface. I do not consider one artistic expression more important than the other—they are just evolutions that each person has, sometimes even involuntarily, in their own life.
