Cleo Fariselli

“My approach focuses on sensation, and steers clear of theoretical or technical postulates. Rather than provide unambiguous readings of reality, I prefer to track it down, as if I were following trails of scent. I use the most diverse media in order to look above all into myself, and investigate the primeval movers behind aesthetical emotion.

Novelty interests me inasmuch as it calls forth atavistic reactions. I would like my works to be experienced the way natural phenomena, such as flowers or crystals, are, with the same sense of contemplative wonderment. The works’ repercussions do not end with one’s immediate experience, but reverberate in their ability to stimulate processes of imagination, to evoke a sort of nostalgia of the unknown. I consider the invisible to be an important component of matter.

Creating artwork helps me connect with myself and others in the most intimate way I know. The starting point for all my work is, in essence, a strong tactile desire. A non-anthropocentric attitude is my guiding light on existence. For me, the endeavor to recount the world from such a perspective constitutes a fundamental ethical and political stance.”
(Cleo Fariselli)

Classifying contemporary artists is far from easy, and is indeed anachronistic, since they tend to use various media interchangeably. In the case of Cleo Fariselli, the task is, if anything, even more formidable. This is because the artist not only ceaselessly varies her technical and expressive repertoire, but also constantly calls into question her formal and aesthetic underpinnings. Despite its ephemeral and metaphorical nature, however, Fariselli’s work evinces a remarkable conceptual coherence, based on her approach to the creative process upstream from the work per se. To observe the world, to experience it, and, above all, to be open to the wonder of day-to-day gestures, events and situations: such are the axes around which Fariselli’s work rotates. An attitude whose starting point is a non-anthropocentric approach to existence, and which makes room for a “perpetual upending of the prejudices that breed a pre-ordained and disabused perception of reality.”1

Vincenzo De Bellis

1 Cleo Fariselli in “Il grado Zero” de Barbara Casavecchia, Flash Art Italia, February 2010, p.104