Luis Ricardo Faléro

Paris, Salon, 1880, no. 380

‘’L’Art Officiel de Jules Gravy à Albert Lebrun’’, Le Point, Paris: Mulhouse, vol. XXXVII, April 1949, p. 14, illustrated

Luis Falero trained in Paris as a portraitist and developed a fascination for painting highly detailed renderings of the female nude. His hyper-realist style often set women in fantastical or mythologic settings, which gave Falero the freedom to explore wild scenes of otherwise indecorous subjects. Vision de Faust, like other examples of Falero's best work, was awarded entry into the Salon and the artist was much admired for his engrossing visions.

The Faust legend, immortalized for European culture by Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, enjoyed renewed interest for 19th century society due to the popular Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Marlowe's Faust, in Renaissance style, was a morality play in which the pride of a tragic hero causes his downfall. For the nineteenth-century Romantic, however, Faust became a new type of hero, whose rebellious desire to experience the breadth of life, including its forbidden behaviors, was considered the greatest of human achievements. Virtue, for 19th century culture, lay in an unending pursuit of life's unknowns, due in part to the prodigious efforts of Goethe.

Falero's Vision de Faust presents Faust's dream as he experiences an adventure through the Satanic realm where witches and demons journey to a communal gathering. Satan, or Mephistopheles, was seen by the Romantics as the dark shadow that enabled humans to see the brilliance of heavenly light; only by knowing the depth of his darkness, could one appreciate the greatness of the light. The faces and striking poses of Falero's demonic women bring the darkness to an entrancing level of detail, a truly captivating vision.