The artistic scene has a new, contemporary artist. F.
We know that F is born in Paris, educated in the US and lives in Milan. There is no indication whether F is a he or a she, clearly the artist is keeping a high level of privacy. But we know that F hosts the small rainbow LGBT pride flag that appears on the website’s contact page, which tells us diversity is not an issue for F. That’s all.
When I was introduced to this artist, my first reaction was that I felt unsettled by the works I saw. I felt there was something very natural and uncomplicated in this artist’s works, and yet I felt something very strong and innovative. You can feel life, meaning and expressiveness all over the works of this artist, as it always happens with important artists. It sometimes happens to get influenced by others when facing a new artist, in this case I had the immediate impression of facing an artist with something important to say. Every single work I looked at touched me, made me reflect and took me to unexpected directions. I was conquered.
F’s art gives the impression of being iconic. However you look at it, you get the sense that the works are widely recognized and that this artist is there to stay. However, this is a new artist. All I know is that a famous novelist, whom I contacted and confirmed me what I’m writing, bought one of F’s works for an exorbitant price, considering this is a new artist on the scene. The novelist is an experienced collector and questioned why he bought this work, he told me he was immediately attracted by F and he considered F’s works a very interesting investment. The work is a portrait 48 by 48 inches made of 2500 unique pictures, shot in a few hours and composed manually by the artist. The work, in concept, is similar to “Penthouse” which you can find on the artist’s website.
As you look at F’s works you immediately have the impression of looking at something that will last. The works seem classic and innovative at the same time, they leave you bewildered. But are they classic? Are they innovative? What are they, if anything?
F is an artist that catches the instant and decontextualizes it, fixing it forever in a steady, unchanging image that conveys a powerful sense of energy and truth. F is clearly concentrated on the instant and gives moment an overwhelming importance. To obtain this, the artist catches an object in a sequence of instants, and composes these moments in an irregular composition which actually obtains the result of making you feel the very essence of these objects, in the moment it was caught by the artist. Just to make an example, this remembers me of Picasso’s technique of breaking into pieces reality to then compose it in an apparently illogical and chaotic manner, which however gives the overall composition incredible truth and strength. If I had to say it all, F gives me the impression of a bizarre mix between Picasso and the American Pop Art. Strange enough to say, I know, but take a look at the works of the “Indistinct” series and tell me.
I would go on and tell you that F’s artwork makes me feel, at times, the loneliness and vivid moment in time drawn by Edward Hopper or James Rosenquist’s Broome Street Truck or even Jasper Johns works. You would then say I am a bit too enthusiast about F. No, I’m not. Actually I still feel unsettled looking at this artist’s works. Still, if I could afford to, I’d buy one of these works, although I would not be so sure why I did it. And this is exactly what I feel about this artist.
The subject and the details of the works are not at all banal, on the contrary the artist seems to carefully select each subject. You always feel to go beyond what you immediately see. Around the original idea and subject that the artist chooses there is a limitless repetition in thousands of nuances of light and angle, obtaining the result of bringing the observer right at the center of a single moment in time, exploding that single moment into thousands of points of view and returning in full the intensity of that moment.
F works on three main ideas: Indistinct, Iconic and Words.
Indistinct are portraits of individual people, for instance famous people, in which over 2500 pictures are shot in one single session of a few hours and then methicolously and manually composed together in order to obtain a single 50 by 50 inch frame in which you recognize the face of the subject exploded into thousands of details. For instance only the mouth or an eye is the result of the composition of over 100 images. The final result is a composition similar to Picasso’s in which everything seems chaotic and unclear until you keep at looking at it and you realize a sharpness, a truth and a strength that you would have never found otherwise.
The same technique is used for works such as “Penthouse” where you see the sky and the rooftops of Milan in an incredibly colored and explosive composition, and in many other works of this series that the artist is developing, such as Stockholms skyline, Zurich’s daylight, New York’s resident’s walking the rush hour’s streets, Milan’s shopping windows, Trees bent to the wind, A Smeg fridge, a McIntosh sound amplifier, a Taccia lamp by Castiglioni, Books pages, Paris instants of poetry, Airplanes crossing the sky, Berlin’s windows, Clouds, Rolling along a French or California highway, Sun, Madrid’s buildings doorways, the uncatchable light reflexes of water in a swimming pool, an American afternoon with people sitting by a park and so many more intimate and personal instants.
Trying to give a context to F’s Indistinct works, I immediately felt something of the Transavanguardia and of the Pop Art periods. I’m thinking of the first Mimmo Paladino’s works for instance, sequences of shots of the sun framed in various shapes, or Andy Warhols decontextualized cans and portraits.
For me, the sense of the Indistinct works by F is that you come to have in your house a part of that vast, unrolling, true life that the artist captured and framed.
Iconic as an all different set of works in which the artist, clearly attracted by the use of words, frames in a background color a sentence, or I should better say a poetry. The effect is very strong. Imagine owning one of these works, incorporating a phrase that represents you and your lifestyle. 48 by 48 inches of a very powerful work, illuminating a wall. What touches me here is the powerful combination of words and color. A strong brushstroke across the entire canvas gives substance to the words of the artist. The background color is computer generated by the artist, while the text is handwritten by the artist. The “Iconic” series of works gives a tremendous relevance to the importance of words, obtaining an effect similar to that of the Pop Art with the objects. A kind of sublimation of the sentence, which takes on an absolute value and connects directly to your soul.
The words of the “Iconic” series have an incredible power, absolutely outstanding even when they are provocative, and this power comes from the fact that F has a strong literary competence, but also because words are decontextualized, just like the artist does with images, are and given a formidable importance thanks to the fact that they are placed right in the center of the picture, standing out unique and unrepeatable.
Words is a bizarre collection of single-copy published books. Here the original aspect is that the books are actually published by an existing publisher and registered with the international ISBN bar code, so that all markets and libraries worldwide have the book in their database and know the book exists officially. However only one single owner around the world may have this book.
Inside you get 256 pages of high quality paperback edition. All pages inside are white, except one single page which contains poetry. Basically, it is a personal poetry.
The collection, a sort of poetry book, is entrusted to a publisher and produced with all the technical features of the real commercial book, so much so that it has its own unique Isbn code registered globally and an evident quality of workmanship, but printed in a single, unrepeatable copy. Inside it is necessary to leaf through a series of blank pages to finally discover, in the center of the book, the real treasure, the text. By doing so, F is able to give an absolute value and importance to the written text, bringing it back to the center of attention on the one hand and making it unrepeatable and exclusive for the collector, given that there is only one copy available, all the more certified and registered. It is quite an attainment to own one of these unique copies, especially since the texts proposed by the artist are very interesting and really do make the difference.
In conclusion, I see here an artist and it may well be a new generation of art.
Lara G.
CulturesMag
