King Kong and the end of the world : Federico Solmi
ADN Galeria presents the work of two artist that share the use of the same medium, drawing, yet they diverge in their approach and process, and apparently, in their discourse.
Federico Solmi (Bologna, 1973) enters the artistic world coming for the outsider realm. His work revels this fact, not only for the themes he chooses (popular, inconoclastic with amusing twists), but also in his frank style with scratches and messy in character, with a Dadaist sensibility, even absurd at times. Solmi´s work crosses the work of the damned Raymond Pettibone, the theories of fluid and anti-nature parings of the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri, and relates in kindship to the filmmaking of Cronenberg.
Solmi presents in ADN Galeria his last video animation, King Kong and The End of The World, as well as some drawings among the 1100 originally utilized for the making of the movie. This piece plays with several ikons of mass culture: the comercial brands, emblems of high culture as the Guggenheim Museum, mingled with some props and attrezzos common in his works like the monstruosity of the phallus. Solmi´s work is fresh and expresses through fantasy the defenseless feeling before the neurotic urban scape.
King Kong and the End of the World (2005) is a four-minute video animation of about 1.100 mix-media drawings on paper. It is the result of collaboration between this self-taught artist and the 3D artist Russell LOWE, conceived as the remake of the original movie dating from 1933. The piece combines the original plot with anachronisms that spark our imagination. The characters are the stereotypical disoriented anti-heroes, in search for identity and forced to live in a hostile, ruthless, and frenzy society. Solmi represents the ruin of present urban life to emphasize our neurotic way of living, hectic and pregnant with dichotomies and contradictions.
The animation was shown for the first time in December 2005 at Pulse Fair, Miami. It was also screened at the Guggenheim of New York during a conference regarding emergent artists, and will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art of St. Etienne, France, in October 2006.
