Cart
0
0.00 €
Insights 1
The focal point of Maralba's artistic and expressive research is to delve into the human soul and understand it.
She draws her artistic references from a thorough study of art history, in a continuous and articulated inspiration.
From the golden background of Byzantine art, which has always fascinated her, she borrows the composition of the figure, which is absorbed to the point of nullifying perspective in favor of the progression of material loss toward the perfection of the soul as a pure spiritual projection.
She adheres to the Manifesto of the Fifth Dimension with Carlo Riccardi (Vip magazine, February-March 1978), of which a critical evaluation by Antonino Ronci is published; She remains a figurative artist, but her works appear strongly inclined toward another dimension, inevitably transcending those known, as skillfully emphasized by Barbara Bernardi in "The Outside and Beyond".
Parallel to the clear direction of her works, she pursues the study of esotericism within European artistic production, which translates into numerous lectures held on the influences that such a subject has had on the history of art. These lectures focus, for example, on the Sistine Chapel, in which Michelangelo conceals the Hebrew alphabet, on Botticelli's Primavera, elucidating the relationships of artists associated with the Medici circle with Ficino and the aim of reaching an elitist artistic dimension, characterized by layers of meaning whose philosophical and esoteric implications continue to be a subject of study; on Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks, and on the Last Supper.
She welcomes particular inspirations that she reproduces in a completely personal manner, drawing from the artists she loves the most or from specific works.
She greatly admires Crivelli, Arcimboldo, Raphael, and Van Eyck, reproducing in her chromatic and compositional research the glazes and transparencies of Beato Angelico. She finds the pain of the soul in Munch's The Scream: pain and dismay that are interpreted by the artist with composure and dignity.
She borrows from Felice Casorati the isolation of the subject within a structure that, instead of welcoming it, alienates it. This estrangement is also pursued in the use of light, which remains always subdued and never defining.
In the villages, the overlapping architectural elements recall Picasso's L'Homme appuyé sur une table.
From Chagall, she admires and reproduces the dreamlike dimension of the characters, their floating in space.
In addition to the background, the use of color and light, she pays particular compositional attention to the shape of hands: in astral journeys, hands serve to embrace and caress souls.
The long, self-aware hands perhaps find their initial inspiration in the Cristo Velato (Veiled Christ), and it is precisely in sculpting and painting the Christ that different artists have allowed the hands they reproduced to ascend to a more otherworldly dimension, akin to the works of Maralba.
Art critic, Pasquale Di Matteo
And now, a dive into memories of the past
Exhibitions:
1966 - 1968 - 1969 O.R.M.A (Art Exhibition Organization) - Turin
1968 - 1973 San Carlo Art Gallery - Naples
1969 Donatello Institute - Rome
Galerie de Paris (1977)
Manifesto of the Fifth Dimension (1978)
Vatican Gallery, art critic Antonino Ronci
Paracelsus Center - Turin (1980)
The solitude of today's man in visually disquieting pages of relevance.
Maralba Focone is a painter who, in an unusual, jealous reserve, experiences contemporaneity more than ever. And she lives it in her most restless signs, in her most colossal contradictions, in the most conspicuous alienations that today's society serves daily to its neurotic constituents.
There is no doubt that Maralba Focone's painting is different both from the usual naturalistic and honey-figurative oil painting and from the unlikely fumisms that hide behind the absence of form and take refuge in hyperboles of absurd interpretation, claiming credentials and assumptions on which it is legitimate to raise more than one reservation.
Certainly, the world of Focone is "unwelcome" to those who, by evading and ignoring the problems of our time, form a concept of existence more inspired by comics, American-style films, operettas, or tear-inducing musical comedies than by the harsh, gritty daily reality.
Maralba Focone's spatula oils are a probe and a scalpel plunged into the heart of daily "drama"; a drama (and we could even remove the quotation marks) in which men (who knows why?) always play a wrong or incomplete part.
In the paintings of this artist, who understands the risk of harshness and the inevitable reaction of an audience accustomed to melancholic late-Romantic landscapes and the insincerity of cloying "liberty", the world is as it actually is: deaf, gray, arid, beastly launched in pursuit of disorienting myths and unaware (at least we hope!) of how much man deprives himself, making a wasteland around the gardens of the soul that could only offer him a glimmer of "revanche" against the insults of fate.
But man, perhaps always, has chosen poorly. "I know the better and cling to the worse", was said centuries ago, in accordance with the Latin "Agnosco meliora, deteriora sequor".
And it is not the fault - indeed! - of Maralba Focone if she courageously places a mirror in front of all of us, where we can see the grotesque nature of our actions.
Ettore Parmeggiani
Cultural center "TER DILFT", Bornem - Belgium (1986)
Paolo Crucitti Gallery, Antwerp - Belgium (1988)
Maralba Focone and her existentialist universe at the Paolo Crucitti Gallery
Maralba Facone is a highly talented Italian artist. Originally from Resine, near Naples, she has been living in Turin for many years, where she teaches Art History. She has exhibited extensively, received numerous awards, and has a vast bibliography.
Until April 2nd, she is exhibiting a series of paintings and drawings at the Paolo Crucitti Gallery, imbued with deep melancholy, where the profound question of the meaning of existence prevails.
However, it is a painting without aggressiveness, full of nuances, where the use of monochromatic or muted colors enhances the poetic atmosphere of still lifes, figures, and houses, which form the core of her themes.
Portraits of women with sorrowful gazes, their large hands almost withered, intensify the expressiveness. Houses with bare and mute walls, sometimes with a few overwhelmed figures around, seem to be seeking an escape from this enclosed world.
It is a very beautiful exhibition that is certainly worth a visit. Maralba Focone's work was presented to the numerous attendees at the opening by Professor Geerts. Also present at the opening were Dr. Galante, Consul General of Italy, and members of the Embassy of the same country.
Continuing to swim through memories..
Exhibitions:
1990 Ancient Ducal Church of Santa Maria Maggiore - Avigliana (Piedmont)
1995 Tenturstelling, Huis Hellemans - Antwerp (Belgium)
2008 Providenza Educational Institute - Turin
- 2013 Committee of Dante Alighieri - Antwerp (Belgium)
- 2016 E' vento di streghe, Count Green's House Museum - Rivoli (Turin)
- 2016 Reflections - Romanesque Church of San Rocco - Condove (Piedmont)
The Colors of the Soul - Hall of Frescoes - Villa Amoretti Library, Turin (2016)
Maralba Focone recently exhibited her work at the Villa Amoretti Civic Library in Turin with an evocative solo exhibition titled "The Colors of the Soul". In her intense paintings, there is an ecstatic sense of form, symbolically expanded by the power of colors. Human subjects, on the brink of figurative expressiveness, become empty vessels of a reality in constant metamorphosis: absent eyes, tired and absorbed faces, essential postures and gestures, in which limbs, highlighted in apparent deformity, narrate a rich inner universe that seeks to react to the prevailing ephemeral contingency of objectivity.
The drama of time is placed at the center of attention, and the intrinsic meaning of eternal pose is unmasked, bringing to the surface a Rodinian desire for abandonment, which reacts to the exuberant impulse of life itself, to a will to power that claims to dominate the entire world. The artist effectively captures the irreparable contradiction and the profound spiritual restlessness it generates.