“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.

Weight: 1.6 kg | Size: 30 × 30 × 2 cm