Andrea Facco

He returns to amaze us with an installation that plays with the quotation of famous paintings of past and modern art, paintings that have marked his training as an artist, focusing his gaze and ours on a specific theme: the signature of the painter, staging a système où tout se tient, as Ferdinand de Saussure would say. Small paintings, made with precision and acrimony, faithfully reproduce the portion of a painting: fragments of a composition completed by an area of white wall bordered by an essential pencil sign indicating the space of an absence, a void that the visitor can fill by fishing for the complete image in the repertoire of memory. On the paintings in the series called # Brand names, we see only the part of the painting that bears the author's handwritten signature. What does the signature mean for an artist? Does it certify the conclusion of the work? Last act placed on the canvas or on the table to sign the precise moment in which the work begins to live on its own life and is no longer only and exclusively of those who created it? Is it a sign of authenticity without which a user could observe the painting with suspicion? In fact, there are countless cases of unsigned works, especially in ancient art, but also in more recent times. Giorgio Vasari, in the second half of the sixteenth century, had defined the inscription on the works with the term "clumsiness". While highlighting the strangeness given by the coexistence of different codes in the work - visual, sign and linguistic - Vasari was interested in the inscriptions, anticipating by centuries a methodology for studying the history of art of recent tradition. So, what do the inscriptions tell us, hidden sources that, like rebuses, need to be deciphered in order to better interpret the work? Sometimes they complete the picture of the work, to use a play on words, adding information to the image but above all providing us with information about their author. That's why the works that bear the signature have something more mysterious than those that do not have it: if in the past the artist had considered it necessary to make a further distinctive sign, which was not part of the custom, there was a reason. Andrea Facco, accustomed to the scrutiny of the topoi of painting, focuses this time on the identity of the artist immortalized over the centuries through its initials. Even today the personal signature has a value proving the authenticity, and not only in the world of art but in our daily lives. In an increasingly digital age we are constantly called upon to demonstrate who we are through our name, handwritten, possibly combined with our photograph reproduced on the identity card or passport. The autograph signatures of Jan van Eyck, Bosch, Dürer, Antonello da Messina, Tiziano, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, il Canaletto, Corot, Courbet, Vincent van Gogh, Segantini, Modigliani, handed down to us through the paintings are set up as a picture gallery of presences, ghosts of the art of the past.
Artists who have defined the paths of our perception of the world as Morandi, Boccioni, Severini, Balla, Carrà, de Pisis, to get to Mirò, Dalì, Magritte, Picabia, Mondrian, Warhol, Lichtenstein, just to name a few. And to arrive at an artist who, precisely around the theme of unknown identity and its physical absence, has built his activity as Banksy.
Once again Andrea Facco talks to us about painting and its mysterious power exercised even
with a simple sign to suggest the virtual presence of its creator and calling the audience
to complete the work.

Daniela Ferrari