Critical Acclaim

"... The views painted by Marina Falco are like old, yellowed photographs, a bit blurred: the trees are blooming, the walls are crumbling and breaking. The dominant Pompeii red, which is contrasted by an earthy brown used sparingly, is the warm, sunny colour of this artist’s recent production: it is the warmth of her Neapolitan origins that Marina Falco has brought with her..." Luca Pietro Nicoletti, January 2008.

"Diptych, pictorial, converging or diverging, these are the expressive instrument used by Marina Falco to express the tensions, disharmonies and fragmentations of the present. Inside a narration that proceeds through contrasting phases, the natural landscape in its cyclical and inevitable alternating of the seasons becomes the leitmotiv of Marina Falco’s painting. A landscape which is evoked in the warm crepuscular colours of autumn or in the red infernal lights of summer lands burnt by the sun, in the grey tones slightly enlivened by the emergence of the azure of the winter solstice or the luxuriant blooming of spring. A landscape that becomes a place of memory and reflection on the Time that has been lived, both intimate and personal as well as historical and a-temporal. And so the continuous changing of the veilings, the transparencies and the shades of colour in the artist’s works can be a metaphor for the transformations of the soul and, at the same time, of the alternation of references to and reminiscences of mythology and history." Chiara Canali, June 2006.

"... Walking through the alleys beheld by Falco, inhaling the scent of her gardens, plunging with her bodies into the serene ruffling of her sea -in the juxtaposition of the typical voids and concretions of her composition- we find the cosmic reciprocity of the endless things-event, which form the reality transfigured by the emptiness. In the flow of the breath and gesture purified by the practice of the emptiness, we can finally forget the opposition between self and world and we can experience the universe as the non-obstruction of the ten thousand beings, and as the brightness of countless crystals mutually reflecting – the web of crystals that is self-foundation without obstructions (shi shi wu ai), in which, from a forgetful time, life de-signs and repeats itself..." Paolo Cappelletti, 2006 March.

"... Marina Falco knows very well that painting has a completely different relation with matter than poetry: so she travels inside colours, transparences, perspectives and beams, because she's aware that an alchemist must turn the stone into gold, the dark into light [...] We see bodies ascending into the air, naked, skinned, we meet red streets and blazing flowers; what a power of thought, what a sharp and original sign in this brave artist who works with the same energy of an ancient Greek and is able to join rigour with passion!..." Giuseppe Conte, 2003 May.

"... Bodies, spaces, places, turbulent skin of the world. The artist’s images descend below the springs of flesh and blood towards the archetype of the emotions, between the memory of Pompeii and the ancient sinopias of myth..." Giorgio Seveso, May 2002.

"... Visions, or better, fragments, that seem as if they wish to interpret the landscape at a different and as yet undefined age, in which the characters appear to be suspended and bearers of universal messages of life, death and suffering. In this sense the artist concentrates on evoking the horrors of war and insane self-destruction of mankind living in diverse impenetrable cities. But the most fascinating aspect of these works is the perception implied by the incomparable harmony of the fragment completing itself in the phantom of mental spaces which have become the images of a dream: that of a remote beauty. In this dimension is achieved not so much the recuperation of a historical age of art but of a timeless archetype, myth..." Mimmo Di Marzio, September 2000.

"... Marina Falco tackles the world of alchemy, in search of those forms and substances that embrace the hidden sense of things. She gives light to black suns, digs through the valence of colour. The artist performs this action also physically on the support, tearing and scraping the canvas and paper on which she is working, making even more dramatically empty images that are full of fragments and traces of suffering..." Elena Di Raddo, May 1999.

"... Marina Falco’s painting, Mediterranean, genuine and precious, is the painting of experience, of memory, the remains of Flegreo colours and traces of ancient atmospheres, it is the painting of time that erodes the friezes and metopa, the frontons and capitals , it is the painting of time that transforms art, it is art that repeats itself, comparing itself to its own history, with its own forms, questioning itself on its past to give a sense and a new energy to its present..." Cinzia Bollino, June 1998.