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.

Renato Miracco

In the current international intellectual landscape, there is a concern with rethinking the relationship between art, history, and identity that is so prevalent that it has made its way into mainstream outlets like the New York Times. Federico Solmi has been focused on this issue since the early days of his long career. Having known him for over twenty years, I have closely followed the evolution of his multivalent and visually daring work. Recently, I met with him in his studio, where he shared the statements, thoughts, and memories that are interspersed in this text with my own ideas. I was struck, as I have always been, by his meticulous iconology and his dexterous process of narrating two realities simultaneously. I was also impressed by the rigor he brings to his work, which he associates with habits formed during his twenties in Italy.

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 WEB

• TG2 – Federico Solmi, Gangemi Editore