The Great Farce

Federico Solmi

The Great Farce

Medium: Projections

The Great Farce is the most recent chapter in New York-based Italian artist Federico Solmi’s unfolding investigation into the unspoken archetypal myths that provide the underpinning for nativist ideologies. Mining the contradictions and inaccuracies of historical narratives that the artist views as having lured their target audiences into a chaotic era of misinformation, Solmi takes particular aim at the society of the spectacle, whose bottomless thirst for glittering pageants of mind-numbing banality can be opportunistically used to purposefully deprive the citizenry of their right to the truth, in the process undermining their capacity to engage in critical reflection of the world around them.

Unlike most video artists, who depend on a lens-based process to create their work, Solmi repurposes the virtual architecture of video games to conjure a phantasmagoric world of whirling space, jerking movement and oscillating facades that strive to overwhelm the viewer’s visual field. 3-D models of characters and environments are built and texture mapped with scans of hand-painted imagery. A virtual world that is equal parts comical and terrifying is created within the game engine, where each scene is staged as a distinct movie set, where the characters act as puppets, animated through motion capture and computer scripts rather than strings.

In the gallery adjacent to the video installation is a vitrine of unique artist books that hint at the artist’s elaborate animation process. Solmi has compiled ten books that include paintings of historic myths alongside the paintings originally scanned to texture eight of his most iconic characters. By donning gloves and turning the pages, visitors are exposed to the tactility that his use of traditional media introduces to new technologies.

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