Maria Faraone´s paintings faithfully reflect her personality.
Personality comes from the Latin “per sonare”, the mechanism that was used in the masks of antique theatre for amplifying the voice in the open air.
A personality sounds, and that is why Maria Faraone´s works have such resonance ???? are well heard.
The daughter of an eminent illustrator, she held a pencil in her hand since she was a child.
Then came the color that does not fear the saturation of warm tones: reds, oranges and yellows. To that we add the black that marks the eyes of her figures.
On this occasion, her work focuses on the Venetian carnival, paradigmatic throughout several centuries. That is why we are not surprised to see the back of a male figure that we identify with Casanova.
It is not easy to situate this artist’s style without identifying her with the “Naïf” or naïve art, which is not elusive to her. Her visual and anthropologic culture makes us take into consideration other aspects that bring her near to what the critic Benito Oliva called the Italian trans-vanguard. This reveals that Maria Faraone, painting outside of the horary time, is a testimony of her time, and this tells us about her authenticity.
Humility is needed to come to these results, as well as a devotion to working and a character that does not vacillate to show its affirmative passion. At times, her figures have the peaceful solidity of the classics. A refined good taste tempers sudden impulses of rebelliousness, but these tell us about a non-conformist spirit that is willing to say what it has to say.

Buenos Aires 2004

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The gaze that looks and does not look.
Octavio Paz

Maria Faraone´s paintings evoke a time of celebration, of colorful, ritual movement where the absence of identities, masks and gowns are the protagonists.
Just like in the celebration of Carnival, the anonymous characters portrayed hide their identities and propose as an initial approach the visual impact offered by their clothes. In this way, greens, blues, yellows and reds follow one another, and when applied with variety in their modulations, they dress the comedians with originality. Maria Faraone´s brush unfolds over the canvas technical resources that guide the observer’s eye to perceive the opulence of the fabrics, their qualities and textures.
As Octavio Paz has written, a gaze that looks finds the reading that separates the elements of the painting and activates the imagination of the spectator. Then, an atmosphere of suspense, intrigue and emotion, sustained by an immobility of disquieting pause that gives tension to the figures, settles on the scenes. The opulence of the clothing accents the flying over of an alarming nightmare.
The masks, like the garments, disguise and conceal the true identities of those who hide behind them. This custom of hiding behind a mask was already practiced in ancient Egypt, Greece and Japan. However, when the Venetian Carnival was born in Italy, in 1662, the custom of wearing a mask to preserve the face and allow the aristocracy some licenses that otherwise would have been considered inadequate was adopted. The function of the mask was to put the prince on the same level as the pauper.
María Faraone´s paintings emerge from the photographs she uses as documentation. At times, the characters enveloped in mystery occupy a preponderant space, but at other times, the urban space around the sea reaches an important centrality. In both cases, there exists a transgressing composition that gives dynamism to the backgrounds by tensing the perspectives with falsity. This is the case with some interiors where the walls are activated to complete the scene through a mirror game, or when she intensifies the second plane by presenting accelerated fugues that contrast, by opposition, with the calm with which the characters pose.
María Faraone invites us to participate in a game of concealed identities, in a fantasy time where mystery, the unknown, and hypocrisy return us to our contemporaneousness.

By Julio Sapollnik (Bach. Art History)