Solmi. Ship of fools

This is a work of epic scale, operatic volume, and moral proportions. This is the ship of fools, a drunken boat with a rudderless crew of scurrilous, a-moral scoundrels, fomenting tragedy and destruction in their wake. We all, alas, have a berth on the boat.

DOROTHY KOSINSKI

Federico Solmi’s work destabilizes our sense of assuredness. We are confounded and unsettled by ranks of ghoulish, ungainly figures marching on us in thickly painted carnivalesque pageantry. If you’re wincing, you’re close. If you’re laughing out loud, you are way off the mark – you mistake his art for cartoon and miss its subversive political punch. Solmi is not preoccupied with topical political commentary; he instead crafts a narrative that transcends historical specificity and rises above satire. […] To facilitate the connection between art and viewer, Solmi carefully counterbalances the hand-rendered and the digitally based. Describing the process of drawing as “domesticating the digital realm,” he first draws crude and generalized papier-mâché figures and then translates them into digital form.

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1973 in Bologna, Italy, Federico Solmi now lives in New York. His groundbreaking work in video and audio was recognized with the award of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2009. Solo museum surveys include American Circus at the Haifa Museum of
Art in Haifa, Israel, in 2016; The Grand Masquerade at the Tarble Art Center in Charleston, Illinois, in 2019; and Joie de Vivre at the Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, in 2022–23. His upcoming solo show The Great Farce is scheduled to open at the Block Museum of Art,
Northwestern University, in Chicago, in September 2024. In 2018, Solmi participated in the citywide project Open Spaces: A Kansas City Arts Experience in Kansas. In 2019, his work was included in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s traveling exhibition The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. In 2021, he was featured in the Phillips Collection’s centennial exhibition Seeing Differently as well as the inaugural exhibition of the Ocean Flower Museum Island in Danzhou, China. He has participated in several international biennial exhibitions, including the SITE Santa Fe Biennial in New Mexico in 2010; Venice Biennale in 2011; Shenzhen Animation Biennial in China in 2013; and Beijing Media Art Biennale in 2016. From 2016 to 2019, Solmi was Visiting Professor at Yale University School of Art and Yale School of Drama, New Haven, Connecticut. He was appointed Guest Critic at the Yale University School of Art for 2022.

RASSEGNA ONLINE

TG2