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For his second solo show at the gallery, Francesco Simeti will present an extension and a development of the ideas explored in the video installation exhibited in October 2010 in Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome, and in the Bensonhurst Gardens project that the artist is preparing for a subway station in NY, ideas born of his reading and research on the idea of nature and wilderness through the history of the Old and the New Worlds.

With Wasteland, the artist intends to re-construct in the gallery a fictitious and artificial wilderness that will recreate a ‘state of bewilderment’ – a mood that ranges from confusion or estrangement even to pure terror – which according to its original etymological meaning was provoked by immersion in nature.

In the second space, we will present the video Scene di Disordine e Confusione, an expression which according to Roderick Frazier Nash in the book Wilderness and the American Mind was used in the Middle Ages to define the idea of “wilderness”. Here a medieval pilgrimage through the early European landscape and its primeval forests is re-imagined in animation, based on the one hand on the Tacuina sanitatis and several other botanical treatises, and on the other hand on a study of landscape paintings of the European Renaissance from Benozzo Gozzoli to Beato Angelico.

Francesco Simeti’s work starts with a meticulous gathering of traces, images and texts taken from the media, a sort of memorabilia of the past which he then reconfigures in his installations, wallpapers, digital prints and in his recent video production.

In his wallpaper and installations we often find naturalistic references and motifs taken from the most diverse sources such as, for instance, the iconography of John James Audibon. The artist is continuing his research into the beautification and commodification of violence; decoration, combined with images of tragic import, becomes a tool to underline this trivialization.

What emerges from the themes tackled by Simeti is a dialectic play between truth and representation that reveals the misleading power of images.

 

For his second solo show at the gallery, Francesco Simeti will present an extension and a development of the ideas explored in the video installation exhibited in October 2010 in Santo Spirito in Sassia in Rome, and in the Bensonhurst Gardens project that the artist is preparing for a subway station in NY, ideas born of his reading and research on the idea of nature and wilderness through the history of the Old and the New Worlds.

With Wasteland, the artist intends to re-construct in the gallery a fictitious and artificial wilderness that will recreate a ‘state of bewilderment’ – a mood that ranges from confusion or estrangement even to pure terror – which according to its original etymological meaning was provoked by immersion in nature.

In the second space, we will present the video Scene di Disordine e Confusione, an expression which according to Roderick Frazier Nash in the book Wilderness and the American Mind was used in the Middle Ages to define the idea of “wilderness”. Here a medieval pilgrimage through the early European landscape and its primeval forests is re-imagined in animation, based on the one hand on the Tacuina sanitatis and several other botanical treatises, and on the other hand on a study of landscape paintings of the European Renaissance from Benozzo Gozzoli to Beato Angelico.

Francesco Simeti’s work starts with a meticulous gathering of traces, images and texts taken from the media, a sort of memorabilia of the past which he then reconfigures in his installations, wallpapers, digital prints and in his recent video production.

In his wallpaper and installations we often find naturalistic references and motifs taken from the most diverse sources such as, for instance, the iconography of John James Audibon. The artist is continuing his research into the beautification and commodification of violence; decoration, combined with images of tragic import, becomes a tool to underline this trivialization.

What emerges from the themes tackled by Simeti is a dialectic play between truth and representation that reveals the misleading power of images.

 

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