I value the practice of painting as a way to explore both inside and outside — of my self, my
work, and my surroundings. During the time a painting is “open” and developing, it serves as a container and reflector for whatever’s happening in life, whatever I bring into the studio with me.Those internal questions get discussed and explored in the choices I make and the covering or exposing of prior moves.
My paintings start without a plan, and usually progress something like building a bridge while crossing it. Formally, I’m inspired by sources in the built environment: interior and exterior space, mundane objects, bright colors, hard edges and sharp shadows, street architecture and road markings, and weathered commercial signage — things made to serve a purpose, then left to age and change and often be totally overlooked.
I’m fascinated by the way paint layers can hold time, conceal and reveal history, and serve as a form of material memory. In the physical world, time and use will wear down textures and alter colors in unintended ways, a process that I’ve adopted for my work by incorporating complete teardowns of my surfaces when needed. Taking scrapers and scrubbers to the face of a painting with several weeks’ work invested in it never gets easier, but it does leave a beautiful, charged field of unpredictable events, restoring potential energy and changing my direction. It’s all come apart... now anything is possible again.
That’s what really hooks me about painting: the uncertainty and the possibility. I’ve never liked making pictures of things that can readily be named, or leaving the whole story on the face of a painting. Not-knowing leaves room. Not immediately finding a purpose or a reason invites questions, and finding answers is a very alive and present thing to do. A very human thing. My experience of the world is shaped largely by my curiosity — call it an inverse certainty — and I want to look at what’s around and inside me without deciding in advance. I hope to leave the work open for others to explore, according to curiosities of their own.
Anthony Falcetta is a native of Manchester, CT, and a 2001 graduate of Massachusetts College
of Art and Design in Boston. His work has been exhibited around New England, New York,
Denver and elsewhere, and is included in various private and corporate collections. He lives and
works in Beverly, Massachusetts, making paintings sparked by the observable, steered by
instinct, and anchored in process.