Venice, 19 April. (askanews) – It is the sense of magic, in suspended atmospheres enveloped in the walls of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Donà dalle Rose in Venice that permeates the exhibition which – after twenty years – from 18 April to 28 July brings Federico Solmi back to Italy with his solo show : Solmi – Ship of Fools, curated by Dorothy Kosinski and co-curated by Renato Miracco, created in partnership with Var Digital Art by Var Group, with the support of the Phillips Collection (Washington DC) and the Thoma Foundation (Chicago – Santa Fe) .
An exhibition that is itself a total work of art, not a simple assembly of videos, paintings, ceramic sculptures, VR works and holograms, but an orchestration of multi-material works of art, in dialogue with each other and with the historical environments of the palace, to give life to an overall and immersive event that leads the viewer by the hand into the dystopian, grotesque and visionary world of Federico Solmi.
A work in which video installations and new technologies take on an important importance, but in a way that is not obvious, as co-curator Renato Miracco explains: “It is a new language, we must be humble to understand this new language, to interpret it and , I repeat, so as not to lump everything together, and therefore every artist must justify, in a certain sense, why he uses this new language”.
Among media works, animated paintings, ceramic sculptures from Caltagirone, monumental paintings, virtual reality pedestals, there is also a new holographic sculpture, developed in collaboration with Var Group, and depicting the Byzantine empress Theodora. Solmi himself explains: “This mirage is basically an image of this great Byzantine empress who is then re-proposed in the form of a kind of influencer, and therefore we have combined this theme of history with the often banality of contemporaneity and the world in which we live” .
