Andrea Facco

The Palettes are surfaces where color both explodes and settles, representing vital residues of a daily practice that carries the full density of the pictorial process. Each palette keeps the memory of gesture and time of the artwork, absorbing shades that no longer belong to a finished painting, documenting its material shadow and its condition of possibility. These are traces, marks, energetic fields from which color becomes an autonomous subject, freed from the need of representation.
It is from these sedimentations that the “greycolor” takes origin, obtained from the runoff of brushes rinsed in water during the painting process. This apparently neutral, leftover substance gives birth to the Ghost Paintings: copies of lost, destroyed and stolen works, permanently denied to our gaze. From Morandi to Caravaggio, from Raphael to Klimt, the series faces with an hopelessly missing iconic heritage, evoking a phantom-like presence. The canvases, executed at a one-to-one scale with the originals, appear as grey apparitions, suspended between homage and impossibility, between memory and absence.
The dialogue between the two series is necessary: while the Palettes preserve the vitality of color, the Ghost Paintings reveal its absence, turning painting into a metaphysical connection between what exists and what no longer is. Chromatic matter, regenerated from residue, becomes a medium for radical reflection: painting not merely as image, but as embodied thought, as critical memory, as an act of restitution.
In this dual tension, between fullness and absence, between presence and phantom, Andrea Facco reaffirms the centrality of painting as a practice of knowledge and an act of resistance.