Italian born, US based artist Federico Solmi’s solo show COUNTERFEIT HEROES opened March 25 at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Maczul) in Maracaibo. His work had been recently featured in POWERS SEEN AND UNSEEN, a group show that opened last fall at Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural, and at Centro de Arte Los Galpones in Caracas past June. These exhibitions represent the debut of the artist’s works in Latin America.
These iterations were part of Global Visions: Insights into International Moving Image Art, a program created by Backroom Caracas and curated by Kelly Gordon. The year-long program of exhibitions, lectures, films and workshops was developed throughout 2016 in Caracas and Maracaibo in collaboration with Maczul, Centro de Arte Los Galpones and Hacienda La Trinidad Parque Cultural.
The catalog for Solmi’s presentations takes a form as distinctive as his oeuvre: a novel, ironic coloring book. Viewers are invited to literally interact with his drawings and sharpen their crayons. Instead of the mesmerizing, reputedly therapeutic impact associated with the fad of adult coloring books, Solmi’s pages offer close-ups with his disturbing caricatures. A sample from the catalog will be downloadable from the Backroom website.
Curator Kelly Gordon writes «Grotesquery and fearsome exaggeration date back to depictions of mankind’s earliest idols. This sensibility surfaces regularly in Western art, notably in Leonardo’s sketches, in war critiques from Goya to Picasso and in the traumatized urgency expressed by Ensor, Munch, Grosz and Basquiat. Extending this legacy of expressionism, Solmi’s haunting social commentaries question how the iconic status of current and historical figures, potentates and celebrities, is conferred by the masses who enable their reputations.»
Federico Solmi (Bologna, 1973) lives and works in New York. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is currently Visiting Professor at Yale University. The artist’s extraordinary video-animations have been featured at the Venice Biennale, Beijing Media Art Biennale, Frankfurt B3 Biennial of Moving Images, Site Santa Fe Biennial and the First Shenzhen Animation Biennial, and at museums including Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Drawing Center (New York), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), National Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow), OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (Shanghai), Australian Center of Moving Images (Melbourne), Victoria Memorial Museum (Kolkata, India), Contemporary Art Center of Rouboix, Palazzo Delle Arti (Naples) and Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome).
Cited on the Artforum 2015 list of «Critics Picks,» Solmi has also had works featured in expositions including Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, London International Animation Festival, Loop in Barcelona and Utrecht’s Impakt Film and Video Festival.
The artist’s disquieting works begin with his conceptualization of imaginary scenarios, sometimes historical in origin and sometimes in reference to contemporary personalities, events or issues. Solmi’s process unfolds through exuberant freehand drawings. These are developed into series of densely painted works, put into motion with 3D imaging software.
This intricate, labor-intensive process deploys satire to express the harrowing dimensions of modern life—the fallacies of power, the pretensions of celebrity and the inescapability of media-conditioned mentality. Solmi burlesques contemporary society by creating a universe filled with characters who move awkwardly through indecipherable, often hilarious situations.
The artist’s work draws inspiration from Orianna Fallaci’s observation: «There’s something missing in all writings about power: Very few are able to capture how funny it is. When they examine the horrors that power commits, the sufferings it imposes, the blood with which it stains itself, historians and political scientists always forget to highlight the ridiculous aspects of the inevitable monster and how funny they are, with their ironed uniformed, unearned medals and invented awards.»
Exhibition Overview
COUNTERFEIT HEROES is comprised of a select group of Solmi’s videos, including The Brotherhood (2015)—a hallucinatory masquerade of current and historic icons, both the feared and the revered. Their festive celebration devolves into a decadent nightmare.
Solmi deploys his signature visual chaos to satirize the self-absorption of celebrity culture and to alert viewers to question how their complacency perpetuates the mythologies that cloak such personalities.
Also on view, Chinese Democracy and the Last Day on Earth (2013) will be screened in Maczul’s Multimedia Room. This trilogy lampoons contemporary society and the self-destructive nature of humankind.
In contrast with their playfully faux-naïve aesthetics, the videos point to a worldwide malaise driven by authoritarian, macho hierarchies. They suggest a poisonous dynamic controlled by vicious politicians, corrupt businesspersons, and ruthless corporations, who operate without regard to common folk and civil society.
Solmi is currently at work on a nine-channel commission based on the history of the United States. Drawn from fact and fiction, this ambitious work will debut, projected on the facade of an opera house in Frankfurt, Germany in November 2017.
Artist’s website: federicosolmi.com
Curator’s text: Between the Lines.
Photos by Jeanniffer Pimentel.
About the curator:
Kelly Gordon, founding Curator for Film and Media at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, has, since 2016, worked as an independent international curator and moving image acquisitions consultant based in Washington, DC. Recent publications include a catalog essay on Ragnar Kjartansson for his mid-career retrospectives in London, Washington, DC and Reykjavik (the latter opens June 2017).
