Faro, an Italian by birth,
saw the light of day for the first time in 1957.

He has always been fascinated by sculpture and painting, and is self-taught.

In 1992, he started making wood sculptures, and has continued to do on a professional basis since 1999.

His work is characterized by its sincerity and by its serious nature, and the details in his creations display a poetic vision of life.

Meeting Faro is becoming immersed in a subtle train of thought, in darkness, in one idea after another. A way of thinking that gains force through the pleasure of using our fine language, a language that he had to master as the son of an immigrant.

When he sculpts, Faro still struggles to attain the essential. He works on wood with the same intensity as he chooses his finely chiselled words. His sculptures with their dense tones of black and shell-like polished surfaces, their knowing tracery imprisoned within their rugged framework are reminiscent of a totem, a pagan idol, a barbaric gem. Faro rarely talks about his work, and even if he does it’s by allusion, circumlocution, a slight remark.

As regards art, he comments: "When you free yourself from thought, from references, you become liberated".

About how he does things, he states: "I don’t have a method. I haven’t got an idea. My sculptures aren’t planned in advance, they just come into being, they are intuitive."

It is not an easy task to transcribe the evanescent nature of emotion: "The difficulty lies in finding the primary emotions underlying it all. But once this has been done, they branch out and develop into something else. I make my own smoke-producing devices, just like a deliberately created haze."

He also says that he wants to avoid taking any short cuts, and prefers the longest of routes: "People ask artists to make sense. I’d like to arouse the desire to live, that part of our existence which is the dream world."

Suffering: "It’s ontological, nothing can be done without it."

Nature: "One has to discover one’s world. I’ve looked at tree barks, pine needles, peripheries. Then all of a sudden the subject appears."

And finally, "You have to open your eyes, seek the infinite."

Since then, Faro has already distinguished himself through numerous exhibitions, including those at Bex-Arts, the Champex Alpine Garden, the Château of Venthône, the Ô Quai des Arts Gallery in Vevey, and very recently at the large Visarte collective exhibition held in the industrial premises of the Giovanola Hall in Monthey, to mention only the most important.

The Ô Quai des Arts Gallery in Vevey and the Grand Hotel Park in Gstaad will be pleased to show you some of Faro’s works.

[By Véronique Ribordy, art historian]