AT: Where are you from and how/why did you start engaging with art?

AF: I am Italian and grew up in Agnosine, a pre-alpine village in the province of Brescia, surrounded by valleys wooded mountains and lakes. I have been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember, these practices have always been part of my everyday life, so I simply followed my nature, aware from the start that this was the only path I really wanted to pursue.

AT: When did it become serious?

AF: I have always taken painting very seriously.

AT: Are there any person who has been significant in your breakthrough as an artist?

AF: Definitely, Katja Noppes and Carlo Di Raco, who were my professors during my academic path.

AT: What is your first approach to the work? How would you describe your practice?

AF: My approach is through drawing, painting and digital. Intuition can arise from an image, an everyday detail, a text, a film, a work of art history. I pay constant attention to my daily surroundings, to the transformations of nature, to the atmosphere generated by atmospheric variations, to fleeting visions of a transfigured reality. Often note down or photograph such references to keep them in mind and then select some, break them down and assemble them again, directly in the final work. The work therefore always develops in progress in close dialogue with the pictorial material. In recent years, I have also begun to digitally process the images in which I fragment the photographic reproductions of my paintings to assemble them with photographs or images from the web; I adopt this process both as a study for the painting and as an autonomous work, translated into still images and recently, into video

AT: What do you aim to reach with your work?

AF: I don’t know, perhaps my aim is the continuous search for the unknown, for something unreachable. I would like to dig deeper and deeper into my work and find new connections, and new points of view that I hope will never be exhausted in time. Art allows me to create a connection to the past, to other, unknown dimensions, which I can only imagine. Through it, I have the impression that I can see aspects of reality and of myself that would otherwise remain hidden from me. That would otherwise remain hidden from me.

AT: What are your favourite tools and materials for working?

AF: Oil painting, without a shadow of a doubt.

AT: What do you feel while you work? Do you usually think about the outcome beforehand?

AF: At first, I think about staying focused, needing silence and cancelling all forms of distraction, forgetting everything and letting myself be carried away by what I am doing. I proceed step by step by step with the painting in a continuous interchange, made up of precise visions, unexpected events, questioning and discoveries. Before starting work, I mentally imagine a general idea about the distribution of masses and colour, but the movement, the unravelling of forms, and the small scenes concerning the material, are largely something unexpected that is generated in the process of the work.

AT: How do you understand that a work is finished?

AF: When I ask myself the question. At this point I put it aside and try to concentrate on something else; after a few days, I return to it and at that moment everything becomes clear.

AT: Where does the inspiration for the work come from?

AF: From memory, from photographs and slides in the family archive, from travel, from artworks of the past.

AT: Are there any artists who influenced your works? Why?

AF: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Paul Bril, Caspar David Friedrich, some members of the Hudson River School and the Symbolists, Max Ernst, and Peter Doig, for different reasons; for lighting, atmosphere, the use of material, for the depth, for certain sensations that they can convey to me and that I would like to project in my work.

AT: How important is the role of social media for you?

AF: I find that a balanced use of social media can be beneficial to work. There is the opportunity to keep up to date with what is going on, the opportunity to learn about the work of many artists from all over the world and to collaborate with people with whom physically it would not be possible to meet. At the same time, the filtered view from the screen does not allow one to get to know and experience and experience the works, and the quantity of material, and visual impulses with which social media bombard us every day, can be confusing and saturating day, can be confusing and saturate us to the point of becoming overwhelming.

AT: What is your opinion about NFTs and their impact on the art world?

AF: I still don’t have a clear idea about NFTs. I find it a potentially interesting phenomenon for digital art but it is still a difficult environment to disentangle and define its value. Furthermore, the dynamics that condition it seems to me at the moment to be much more related to investments than to art discourse.

AT: As an artist, what is your point of view about the contemporary art system?

AF: I think it is important to surround yourself with people who are passionate about your work, genuine, who have an interest in artists and their research, and to have transparent and constructive dialogues with them. I find that such a system is helpful in that it recognises the value of artistic work but is sometimes limiting and closed in on itself.

AT: What do you find to be the most challenging or daunting thing about pursuing art? What is the the most rewarding part of working as an artist?

AF: The best part is spending most of my time in the studio painting, experimenting, and reflecting. The worst part is not having the time to do it for other reasons, and also being in a more or less economically precarious state a more or less constant state of economic precariousness. One of the most rewarding things about working with art is also to see feedback and a sincere interest in one’s work.

AT: What do you do besides art?

AF: I travel, visit museums, watch films, read and spend time with my loved ones.

AT: What are your goals and expectations for the future?

AF: To participate in projects and artistic residencies especially abroad, to initiate new interesting collaborations, and in general, continue to work with the same energy as I have now for as long as I can will be possible.

Alice Faloretti (Brescia 1992), lives in Brescia and Venice.

The work investigates the relationship between human and the surrounding environment, through a mutual confrontation in which personal and collective episodes intertwined each other, in a new set of connections. The lived landscape becomes the main basin of analysis and discovery from which to grasp the essence of the perceptual data, which is then assimilated and filtered through an intimate gaze, deeply linked to memory and the imagination.

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