Interview: Nicola Farina
Luca Curci talks with Nicola Farina during CONTEMPORARY VENICE 2021 – THE SECRET GARDEN, at Misericordia Archives.

Nicola Farina was born in Monte San Vito in the province of Ancona on July 01, 1964. He attended the Edgardo Mannucci Art Institute in Ancona and later the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata. He has always carried out an artistic activity and is a teacher of the Figurative Arts department at the Edgardo Mannucci Art School in Ancona. He has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions. Among the most important are the Marche Prize and the Salvi Sassoferrato Prize, devoting himself above all to competitions and commissions.

LUCA CURCI – How did you get to your current artistic practice?
NICOLA FARINA – Through increasingly introspective research, in which life and art are confused.

LC – What are your thoughts while you paint? Do you have any habits or rituals while you work?
NF – My constant thought is to immerse myself in the secret of painting, to feel painting as a secret and revealing thought. I need silence and concentration to devote myself entirely to the genesis of the image.

LC – Are your artworks focused on a specific theme?
NF – The theme, the desire, to which I tend is the overcoming of the pictorial material to work above all with the spirit of painting. Each research cycle is an attempt to abandon the visible in order to tend towards the vision, to perceive the fragile thrill of iconography beyond appearance.

LC – Did your style change over the years? In which way?
NF – It has changed in the sense that I wanted to abandon myself to uncertainty, to lose all certainty of practice in order to transform technique into an act of existence. The painting act has become immaterial, a constant tension between dissipation and resilience.

LC – Do visitors’ suggestions enrich yourself and your art?
NF – Each suggestion is a gift, the encounter with the other’s gaze is a gift.

LC – In which way the artwork presented in our exhibition is connected with the exhibition’s theme?
NF – I think it can interpret the value of the mystery connected to the perception of oneself in the world. The Secret Garden: The inner world and the objective world as an inextricable forest in which the senses and feelings can emerge and with them, the sense of art can germinate.

LC – Can you explain something about the artworks you have in our exhibition?
NF – I presented a work entitled “Melancholia” from the cycle of the “Aporias”. It is a glass case whose glass retains bee pollen dust, preventing its fecund dispersion. The glass itself retains an iconographic semblance, on the threshold of becoming an epiphany or dispersing into nothingness, it retains because the technical process involves the fusion of a ceramic pigment in the vitreous matter. A reliquary but an unsolved, saturated, reliquary in which the temporal dimension is absent or eternal. In the immobile identity of the figure, there is its meaning. Death and life face each other, giving back to painting the original purpose: to probe human destiny.

LC – Do you think ITSLIQUID GROUP can represent an opportunity for artists?
NF – I think ITSLIQUID GROUP is a great opportunity for artists to share their work. The international value of the events makes ITSLIQUID a unique reality in the art system.

LC – What do you think about the organization of our event?
NF – I was able to appreciate the high professionalism and availability of the Artistic Director Luca Curci and of all the staff to whom I am deeply grateful.

LC – What are your suggestions about our services? Is there something more we can provide to artists?
NF – The level of completeness of the services is very satisfactory.