Federico Solmi: Escape Into The Metaverse

FedericoSolmi: Escape Into The Metaverse examines the work of Federico Solmi, a leading practitioner in the genreof new media art. As a narrative and figurative artist, Solmi utilises lurid coloursand satire to portray a dystopian vision of contemporary society, highlighting thecontradictions and fallibilities that characterise our time. Employing video, painting,drawing, sculpture, sound and digital game design, he creates a carnivalesque virtualreality with historical and present-day world leaders – animated by computer scriptand motion capture performance – in a critique of Western society’s obsession withpower. Inspired by real events and fabricated myths, Solmi explores, re-interpretsand concocts celebrated moments in history. As reconfigured narratives, these socialand political commentaries disrupt the mythologies that underpin Western society,revealing its ties to nationalism, colonialism, religion and consumerism.

The book documentsSolmi’s unique process of melding traditional art practices and digital technologiesin a case study of his most ambitious video-painting to date, The Bathhouse (2020). Pioneering new modes of cultural production and art experience affordedby the metaverse, Solmi’s absurd rewriting of past and present merge dark humorand a sense of the grotesque in a virtual world that indicts our own reality.

Solmi was born in 1973 to a working-class family in Bologna, Italy. He is self-trained and self-educated. In 1999, he moved to Brooklyn, New York, to pursue his career. His perspective reflects his outlook as a cultural voyeur, questioning the nationalistic and revisionist American mythologies that are often presented as fact. In 2003, Solmi began to experiment with the tools of video game design, fascinated by the parallel universe made possible by 3D graphics, which he saw as a structure to create narrative video sequences using drawings and paintings. Every visual texture is painted and scanned on the computer up to three times to achieve the intentional flickering effect. The art of Paolo Uccello, Giorgio Morandi and Giorgio di Chirico serve as references for his visual compositions, while the writings of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and Oriana Fallaci serve as inspiration for his social and political commentary.