Francesca Facciola

Francesca Facciola works primarily in hyperrealist painting and drawing to explore the intersections of myth, psychology, and contemporary digital culture. Merging technical precision with an almost psychedelic visual vocabulary, she transforms familiar archetypes – heroes, innocents, villains, and outlaws – into uncanny tableaux that examine the collective unconscious.

Facciola’s practice begins with the careful staging of scenes – often using props, costumes, and performers – which she documents before meticulously translating them into paint. She has cultivated a mastery of both analogue and digital techniques, including grisaille and chiaroscuro painting, and animation character design. This straddling of past, present, and speculative processes allows her to navigate the tension between the virtual and the material: her luminous surfaces encapsulate both the cinematographic glow of the screen and the tactile presence of the painted image. Recurrent motifs, such as articulated wooden mannequins or latex-clad animals, serve as surrogate selves and vessels for projection, reflecting her interest in embodiment, agency, and artifice.

In 2022, Facciola began a key creative cycle within her practice, entitled F is for Fun, manifesting as an epic visual poem comprising four chapters. Drawing upon diverse narrative sources as “highbrow” as the Iliad, Dante’s Inferno, and Renaissance mannerism, or as “lowbrow” as Pinocchio, biblical allegory, and CGI animation, Facciola employs a form of hyper-montage that mirrors the nonlinear workings of the subconscious. By fusing classical and digital languages, she reconfigures enduring myths of greed, transformation, and desire, remixing and reinjecting them into our already image-saturated world. This ambitious work bears witness to her unquenchable appetite for technical skill, complex narratives, and ever-evolving sources of inspiration.