Federico Solmi Rush to Hospital II
Federico Solmi Inside Hospital
Federico Solmi has this fantasy (fantasy fantasy?) about being Rocco Sifreddi,* super-celebrity, fellow-Italian porn star, and he has hand-drawn some 400 frames in order to assemble his own four-minute animated movie, "Rocco Never Dies." The gallery site offers an excerpt for viewing.
But although in the film Rocco actually does die (of a heart attack, after participating in a large-scale orgy strapped-down as an important cog in "The Fucking Machine"), judging from his own much more creative role in this exercise, Solmi should have a great (art) career ahead of him.
Now that I brought it up, I think I should include an image of that infernal machine, so here it is:
Federico Solmi The Fucking Machine
This neat little show, installed in the second gallery at Boreas, includes a large number of related drawings and several paintings. The paintings are executed on a stiff gauze medium, lightly prepared with a white base, before they receive the elegant line of his black marker. They are extremely attractive, as much as objects as for those beautiful black lines. New York, by the way, has rarely looked so exciting, with the tops of both the Statue of Liberty and the Chryler Building lodged akimbo in the middle of its busy avenues.
Full disclosure: I had seen several works by Solmi over the last year or two and I was intrigued. Late last year we were happy to bring home one of his small enigmatic paintings from the D.U.M.B.O Arts Center benefit, and it now hangs in our apartment. Here is the image, created originally as part of his "Safe Journey Exhibition" (2002-2004):
Federico Solmi Was a BMW oil marker on shaped gauze canvas 9.5" x 12"
*
I'd never heard of him until I read about this show, even though IMDb lists 252 films under his name. It must be the plots.
[top two images from Federico Solmi, where they are described as drawings; bottom two from Boreas, where the first is described as a still from the video]