Camilla Falsini: “My colours on ceramic, inspired by Memphis”

She paints on the walls of houses and on sheets of paper and creates bright poetic digital images for magazines, books, companies, festivals, or even just for herself. Camilla Falsini lives and works in Rome, but follows her works around the world, as she did recently in London, where she was the star of a live performance as part of Clerkenwell Design Week. On a three-metre slab of stoneware she interpreted works from the ‘Ceramics: Neverending Artworks’ exhibition, by masters from the Memphis group and associates, in the London showroom of the Iris Ceramica Group. Creating an artistic dialogue with masters of radical design like Sottsass, Mendini, Branzi, Cibic, Du Pasquier and Sowden seemed like a wonderful opportunity to her: “The works on display are amazing”, she said “and I was really keen to do this performance. I especially like the lines and colours in the aesthetics of the Memphis movement. My performance was a tribute to their ceramics, which are real works of art. I reinterpreted them in abstract, colourful, vertical forms, on a bare ceramic base, a dark surface that has become part of my creation”.

Becoming an illustrator was a clear choice for Camilla: “I’ve always been fascinated by the applied arts. Illustrators work mainly by commission, with an aim”, she continues. She also admits that she’d like to have more time for her own research. “In my profession, you have to take into account a number of factors that pure artists do not have to think about: building effective communication, working with different media and understanding their effects, as well as working on different scales. Attention to detail has to be related to the size of the illustration. If it’s the wall of a building, it needs to be enhanced enough to be comprehensible, especially from a distance. If it’s the page of a book, the relationship has to be reversed.”

Falsini produces mainly digital works using vector graphics, but also uses classic collage technique, creating compositions from sheets of paper that she paints herself, sometimes in solid colours, sometimes with raised textures. The collage is a physical version of vector graphics: “ This is a return to manual dexterity, seeing as most of my work is done on the computer. I love the idea of cutting up coloured paper that I’ve prepared myself, using enamels, acrylic colours and whatever else I have available at the time, including mixing them together. The collage technique lets me experiment, change, move pieces around and fix them. Sometimes it’s just chance that leads me in different directions.”

Camilla's visual universe reduces the figures to what is essential. They become two-dimensional, with a fantastical character and playful proportions in a suspended atmosphere. Colour is another of her special features - bold colours like reds, blues, yellows, greens, pinks and light blues: “My world communicates through colours ”, says Camilla. “They’re an essential part of how I express myself. I almost always prefer bright colours and clearly defined areas and I virtually never use pastels or dark shades. I was recently asked by a magazine to interpret one of Milan's iconic buildings. I chose the Velasca Tower, but I represented it in pink, red and green. Crazy colours that made it a surreal, fantastic image.” Camilla’s future commissions include working with a Korean company and she’s very happy about it because she’s strongly attracted to the aesthetics of the East. It is a visual universe that, on closer inspection, has more than one thing in common with her own.

Antonella Galli

Captions and Credits
All images: Courtesy of Camilla Falsini

01 Portrait of Camilla Falsini
02,03, 15-17 Camilla Falsini performance at Ceramics: Neverending Artworks courtesy of Iris Ceramica Group
04 Mostro Gentile. A giant on the wall of a primary school in Brescia, part of the LINK Urban Art Festival, curated by the True Quality Association. Photo by Marcello Palazzolo.
05 Cover Design for Il Sole 24 Ore. Cover images for the design special issue published in September 2021 for the Salone del Mobile.
06 Inception Napapjiri. A wall creation in Milan in 2019 for Green Week. Photo by Mariano Dallago.
07 Luce + Acqua Napoli. A wall creation in Naples in 2021 inside the CIS in Nola in partnership with the Bereshit association. Photo by Bereshit.
08 3 Collages on paper, 2021
09 Cover Design for Il Sole 24 Ore. Cover images for the design special issue published in September 2021 for the Salone del Mobile.
10 Illustration for the launch of B&B's Noonu sofa created by designer Antonio Citterio.
11 Due occhi verdi (Two Green Eyes). Collage on paper.
12 Danzatori (Dancers) (cm 35x50). An art print created in partnership with the Street Levels Gallery, Florence, 2021.
13 Ferrara Under the Stars, images for the 2020 music festival.
14 Collage panels created for the launch of BeSpoke Fridges by Samsung.

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