Room with a View: Paintings by Andrea Facco

In a curious reversal of Paper Museums upstairs, where prints reproduce paintings, Room with a View upsets conventional hierarchies that deem unique works to be of far greater value and importance than multiples. Andrea Facco, who was born in 1973 in Verona and currently lives in Bologna, has occasionally executed his highly realistic paintings in editions, highlighting how some images repeated endlessly—on TV and the Internet, in print media and product packaging—come to permeate our consciousness. Facco, like a number of his contemporaries, investigates the myriad possibilities of painting and, in particular, its relationship to photography and visual culture.


In a curious reversal of Paper Museums upstairs, where prints reproduce paintings, Room with a View upsets conventional hierarchies that deem unique works to be of far greater value and importance than multiples. Andrea Facco, who was born in 1973 in Verona and currently lives in Bologna, has occasionally executed his highly realistic paintings in editions, highlighting how some images repeated endlessly—on TV and the Internet, in print media and product packaging—come to permeate our consciousness. Facco, like a number of his contemporaries, investigates the myriad possibilities of painting and, in particular, its relationship to photography and visual culture.

For Room with a View, one modest painting, also entitled Room with a View, sparks the subsequent works, all of which reprise details contained in the primary work. Among them is a series called Zapping, the Italian slang for channel surfing. Installed in a grid, these small paintings reproduce images Facco digitally photographed while watching television during a specified time period. Featured are snippets from a weather station, cartoons, sporting events, pornographic films, news broadcasts, and talk shows, among others. In a similar vein, Facco creates tiny “stamps” reproducing his paintings. Referring to the common practice of issuing postage stamps to celebrate paintings by well-known artists, they confer upon his work a fictive validation. By meticulously fashioning them, he also invokes the historic tradition of miniature painting, which not only demonstrated the creators’ skill but predated photography in allowing images to be easily transported. Executed in trompe l’oeil, Facco’s “stamps” also riff on paintings as commodities. Gluing his stamps onto postcards that picture on their reverse sides photographs he has taken of his own hand painting the miniature, he mails them. Often the postcards, which include the cancelled stamps, are exhibited alongside the paintings they reproduce. In these cases, postal officials have mistaken a unique painting for a multiple commodity.