Liste 2026

Basel

Lodovico Corsini is pleased to present a project by artist Francesca Facciola (b.1994, New York, NY) . Conceived as a visual epic poem, this new ensemble of works forms the fourth chapter in a creative cycle begun in 2022 under the title F is for Fun. She presents a threetiered installation of hybrid oil paintings: a fragmented psychic realm. Facciola’s practice unfolds at the intersection of technical mastery and a hallucinatory visual vocabulary. Having developed hyperrealist techniques, her work now turns toward “hypermontage,” a mode of image construction that mirrors the nonlinear operations of the unconscious. She fuses characters and worlds, binding disparate elements through narrative.

Her anchorings (classical and CGI alike) share epic storytelling, bridging myth and hypercontemporary mass culture. By using narrative to depict human nature, she probes the collective psyche and our fascination with archetypes and plot. Akin to a sequel in a film franchise, this fourth chapter of F is for Fun centres on the figure of Greed. Echoing the Fourth Circle of Hell, it recalls Dante’s Inferno, where the hoarders and squanderers of wealth are punished. Facciola embodies Greed as a dysfunctional family of four: horse, bull, pig, and goat, each clad in latex cosplay animal suits of the artist’s design.

The works are conceived as a fragmented landscape with interlocking stages. Every element of the installation originates from a single monumental painting, cut and re-stretched, and scattered. This preserves the coherence of light, reflection, and depth across fragments, pushing painting beyond two dimensions out into the room. At its centre, a glowing pit of blue goo seen from above appears to pulse, while around the periphery a rocky terrain emerges from cut-out canvases stretched on small frames. 

Four paintings depicting ‘Cantos’, or chapters, encase the space. These episodes illustrate hedonic adaptation: the diminishing returns of desire, where satisfaction evaporates as insatiable need grows. Each scene is inlaid into a pristine tartan fabric rendered in oil paint, creating a sense of visual tension and overload, all the while gesturing to ideas of affiliation, exclusion, and clannish movements. Facciola’s practice relies on prodigious upstream labour. Self-taught, she has mastered grisaille and chiaroscuro and deeply studied animation character design. In the studio, she stages and films with props, performers, and costumes, embodying the pig while dancers take other roles; directors and camera operators document candid studio performances. Figures then evolve through sketches, turnarounds, expression sheets, and key frames to fix movement and gesture. The moving body is central, mediating between performance, digital aesthetics,and painterly tradition, and generating material she translates into paint.