"For years the Leghorn painter Maurizio Faleni has been pursuing a fascinating research on color that places him among the most interesting and original names in contemporary Italian art. First with experiments on monochrome, now with explorations on "osmosis" to find similarities between different chromatics.

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[...] for at least fifteen years has been intensely experimenting with color, presenting himself with one of the most constant, determined and conscious abstract researches that contemporary Italian art offers its public. 

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[...]aluminum, as is well known, is a material that can be endlessly recycled. And this is Faleni’s way of conveying to the public his idea of art, which is that it is eternal. As long as human beings exist in the world, there will also be art, because the need to express oneself through art will never cease.

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[...]Maurizio Faleni responds to this need through color. For him, color is everything or almost everything, it plays a prominent role in his work that unveils light by means of color, touches the areas of our brain that process abstract images, and comes to perceive, through color, beauty understood as “that dimension that composes the sensible with the supersensible” of which Umberto Galimberti speaks. Touching the sensible to reach the supersensible, then: this, too, is one of the most concrete results of Faleni’s art. In this sense, the thunderbolt for color, he tells me, came from his encounter with Mark Rothko, deepened in 2007 when the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome dedicated to him one of the most anticipated exhibitions of that season. What fascinated Faleni, however, more than the metaphysical intimacy of Rothko’s paintings, more than the almost spiritual lyricism of his paintings, was the sensitivity that the great abstract expressionist demonstrated for color.

 

[...]Faleni’s works of art are born from the encounter between chance and the freedom of the artist who decides to intervene with his gesture on that randomness, which, however, takes place within a scheme that the artist has created according to his own rules, while nevertheless being subject to the laws of nature and physics. Those who wish may also read in Faleni’s works a metaphor for existence itself.

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[...] Faleni’s “stains” traverse centuries of art backwards: they go through the whole affair of the Macchiaioli, go up the sinuous and animated lines of the Baroque, and arrive at Rosso Fiorentino, another painter watched with supreme interest by Faleni for the squillant and hallucinatory quality of his colors, and then back to Masaccio, to Beato Angelico, to Giotto.

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[...] In these polychrome works one will be able to see the fluid energy of water, someone will see in them curtains of confused smoke, still others will notice in them parts of the human body, landscapes, forests, plants, animals, the most diverse natural elements. With synaesthetic momentum one will almost come to smell the scent of flowers, the countryside, the sea. The sensations one gets from observing these paintings are different from those aroused by monochromes also because, unlike the latter, on the new works Faleni has chosen to intervene with opaque protectives, which eliminate all reflective effects and end up giving the painting the appearance of a captured instant, which, however, looks as if it could move again at any moment. And if the monochromes open up to more intimate, meditative, if not sacred dimensions, and suggest a sense of waiting and silence, the polychrome paintings, on the other hand, appear to be moving images (and offer the very sense of movement with the highest effectiveness), communicating the idea of a flowing stream, of life that is constantly changing and moving, of the many events that dot our daily lives. Transcendence and immanence. Spirit and matter. Concentration and distraction. The indefinable distance of color and the closeness of an encounter.

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[...] What Maurizio Faleni does today in his studio, a few hundred meters from the sea in Livorno, is basically nothing more than what the Macchiaioli, the post-Macchiaioli, the frequenters of the Caffè Bardi, the animators of the Labronico Group did and have continued to do for decades in his own city. In short, the many generations of artists who breathed the salty, heavy air of this marvelous city, and who allowed themselves to be carried away by the clear, crystalline, full and dazzling light of a Livorno resplendent with glow, sunshine and life even in the dead of winter. That is, translating images into color by trying to find the form of light. The Macchiaioli, whom Faleni, as a native of Livorno, has studied and knows in depth (the best, for him, is Cristiano Banti, because he was able to intuit first the revolution of the Macchia), did so by resorting to the figure, while he, on the contrary, proceeds by abstract ways, but the soul is identical. Maurizio Faleni thus appears to be the repository of a tradition, an artist who continues to explore the paths of color beaten by his countrymen over the centuries, trying to open his own path, widening his gaze to the experiences of those who have investigated color, until he comes to exalt the charm and potential of color with original results, in an exceptional combination of techniques, knowledge, awareness, motivations, objectives, results. Getting to the light: a challenge at the limits of the possible. And precisely for this reason worthy of engagement."

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Federico Giannini, Finestre sull'Arte