“Stefano paints, writes, glues, collects feathers, shovels clouds, makes magic boxes, cranks, pendulums, marionettes. Stefano travels, but he becomes a monk when, in his Turin atelier, he paints with obstinacy. Stefano watches. He is a man who has an infinite attention to the world. He knows Arabic and Eastern cultures. He is tall, has long hair, a thin face, he goes around wearing jackets and trousers with many pockets where he hides pens and sketchbooks.”
Andrea Semplici
“Stefano is the only artist capable of painting with a presumably short hair, or a painlessly plucked rabbit fur…”
Guido Ceronetti
Philosopher, traveller, painter, Stefano Faravelli is a multifaceted, eclectic, in some ways unexpected artist. When you come across his works you can’t help but remain silent and amazed. You start walking through the gallery of “Mundus Immaginalis”, move on to that of the “Apocryphal Zoography”, to the wonderful Sketchbooks and Carnets de Voyage and even further… and you get lost. And it is a beautiful bewilderment, one of those in which you want to remain for a long time because Stefano Faravelli’s works, created with such vehement minutiae, are of extraordinary beauty and enchantment. Because you begin a visual and internal journey that has no boundaries, that has no definitions, that constantly changes depending on your sensitivity, your state of mind, your desire to search and find something. And also on your desire to go further.
Wrote the greatest, Muhyddin Ibn ‘Arabi, Islam’s mystics
Apocryphal Zoography – “ My philosophical menagerie houses wise animals, which have followed bizarre and incongruous evolutionary lines.
A parallel natural history where goats can ‘giraffize’ take on abnormal mutations and not very Darwinian hybridizations.
In my bestiary you will also find donkeys in parrot school and graduated dogs. You will find cats serving tea to mice and birds in Jesuit meditation.“
Carnet de Voyage
Thanks to his numerous publications, Stefano Faravelli gave life to the genre of the Carnet de Voyage. His Sketchbooks have been exhibited in various parts of the world including London, Paris, New York, Istanbul and Jerusalem.
For Stefano Faravelli the ‘Via del Taccuino’ is the art of Unveiling: “Unveiling of the world, because the journey, with its breaking of habits, its undermining the addictions of ordinary life, involves a renewal of the gaze and an awakening from the lethargy of conventions, which is the rediscovery of the world as a weaving of signs to be interpreted and understood.”
As Baudelaire admirably wrote: “No one is more suited to enjoying a landscape than the one who observes it for the first time, since nature then presents itself in all its extraneousness, not yet weakened by too frequent of a gaze”.
Travelling with a sketchbook, drawing as I’ve been doing for years, is my way of compensating the world – creation – for the wear and tear of ‘weakened’ gaze.
The medium of drawing and painting is particularly suitable for grasping this revelation of the world and for penetrating its astonishing novelty.
