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Je ne sais quoi - oil on canvas, AFAN Alessandro Fantini (2012)
currently exhibiting at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Pasadena (CA).
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Holy-Smokes!
Alessandro Fantini, today’s featured artist, has probably the greatest
answers I’ve come across in the history of my interviewing artists. I believe, for me, it’s because as an artist
myself, I totally “get it.”
How would
you describe your work?
A
lot of people tend to believe that, nowadays, art is just an inexplicable
activity belonging to selfish postmodern dandies focused on figuring out
improbable concepts that someone else will convert into reality on their
behalf, or on setting up politically incorrect happenings and performance to
attract media attention in order to boost the prices of their artworks.
Instead,
when I think about art, I instantly imagine a dark gigantic pool where each human
being learns to develop his own breathing methods and swimming styles. I bet
many art connoisseurs will be dismayed to find out that the Greek musician
Vangelis is also a talented painter, that the Italian painter Andrea Savinio
was also a composer and a writer, or that the Austrian drawer Alfred Kubin wrote
a genial novel in 1908 anticipating the themes of movies such as “Dark City”
and “Matrix”. These are just few examples to demonstrate that art is, first of
all, a primeval urgency that can be declined in many different forms through
the same individual sensibility and aptitude.
Therefore
I coined the neologism “multimedianic” to better define my versatile creative
system by using the metaphorical image of the “medium”. During the séances the
latter is the living channel through which the spirits are able to manifest
themselves into the human dimension. Thus they can communicate by sounds or words
spoken by the medium or formed on the “ouija” board, or even reveal themselves
in material shapes like the so-called “ectoplasm” emitted by his body.
Obviously
I don’t mean to give scientific credit to these paranormal phenomena: I just
consider them an effective poetic way to describe my own artistic process,
whose main precondition is the urge to translate, often simultaneously, an over
human language through several human procedures able to preserve its selfless
and outlandish quality into their wide range of expressive codes. That’s why,
even when my writings, paintings, songs or movies are transpositions of my own
mood and sensibility, at the same time they’re the simultaneous aesthetic
manifestations of a mysterious stream of visions and feelings residing in our “chromosomic
memory” of mammals with large brains.
Consequently,
dealing with more than a “medium” isn’t dictated by the will of widening my
commercial appeal, or by the ostentation of eclecticism as usually happens, for
instance, with some musicians publishing books or acting in movies just because
they can rely on the popularity they’ve already achieved. On the contrary, my
artistic output can keep evolving only until it works like a biologic
architecture made of different rooms interconnected with each other. In this
sense I like quoting a sentence by the orator Caton: “Rem tene, verba sequentur”
“Grasp the subject, and the words will follow”, meaning, in my case, that the engine
of creative process doesn’t derive from skills, specializations or knowledge of
techniques and art history, but it’s triggered by rediscovering the inborn
ability to swim in that obscure pool of visions and memories floating out of
time and space.
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| Abbrivio, oil on canvas,
Alessandro Fantini (2010) |
What
are you working on in the month of March?
As usual I’m caught in an ever mutating river of
multiform projects, in some case so ambitious and time-consuming that I need to
establish a schedule or mental hierarchy that, however, I don’t use to follow
rigorously, but that helps me in psychological terms to keep working in a
synchronized way.
Right after completing the new episode of “AFANzine”,
a web video-magazine series dedicated to the artists and movements that
influenced me the most over the years (available to watch on my Youtube channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq0flpRnA40
)
I’ve reprised sketching my new oil painting based upon
the idea of merging spiritual longing with erotic desire, as well as composing
a new concept album revolving around the theme of night life and mental
darkness (it will be released within the next month on my Bandcamp page: http://afanalessandrofantini.bandcamp.com
). In the meanwhile I keep writing the
second volume of my novel “The Abyss Will Gaze” and elaborating concepts for a
graphic novel whose story I derived from one of my unfilmed screenplays.
What
living artist (besides yourself) do you find “amazing”
right now?
It’s hard to say who, among the living artists I once followed,
is still able to amaze me or exerting some kind of fascination going beyond mere
admiration. I might say that I deeply respect the wizardry of David Lynch,
since he’s not only one of the very few contemporary artists closer to my
“multimedianic” approach, but one of the very rare who, even after becoming a
mainstream director, never ceased deconstructing and contaminating the media.
From the underground art-movie “Eraserhead” to the more recent video he
directed for his own song “Crazy Clown Time,” it’s quite evident that he’s just
complying with the same drive that guided him to conceive his first animated
video “Six Men Getting Sick” when he was an art student without any experience
in directing or animating. It’s the
purity of his vision that defines him, despite the media, the techniques or the
style.
What
recent news worthy even has inspired you?
How?
Even though at first glance many of
my artworks don’t look directly related to or influenced by current topics or
social events, their conception is always affected by the cultural environment
and historical facts occurring in the time span during which I elaborated them.
Somehow the “Arab Spring” and the
earthquake that devastated the Aquila city here in Abruzzo (Italy) had a huge
impact on the subjects of the paintings made over the last 3 years, as shown by
the images of dark thresholds exposing a disproportionate chrysalis or hand
bomb covered with faces of dice depicted in “Abbrivio” and “The opening of
Mammon’s orgy” (a selection of my oil paintings are available on Deviantart http://afantini.deviantart.com ); or the
feature movie “Edonism” I directed in Tokyo in 2010, whose plot offers a
symbolic association between the seismic calamity and the emotive realm of
humankind.
What
is your favorite movie? Why?
For 20 years at the top of my
personal list, above “Shining” and “Mulholland Drive”, there’s “Blade Runner.”
I‘ve lost count of the times I watched it both for enjoying its peculiar
“moodscape” and studying its visual and technical nuances. I would say that it embodies the earnest form
of “multimedianic opus” where the summation of music, cinematography, art
design, acting and script enhance each of them, to the extent that they contribute
to evoke a state of mind otherwise ineffable.
That’s why I dare to define it more than a simple sci-fi movie: perhaps
it’s the only artwork able to freeze in 2 hours of kinematic melancholy the
enigma of human soul.
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The Horizon of the events, oil on canvas,
AFAN Alessandro Fantini(2008) |
What
was the last song you heard? Did you
sing along?
When I visited Florence some years
ago I rented an apartment not very far from the centre, where I spent the
nights alone after long days of exploration and walking among museums and
churches. Before going to sleep I used to listen to “Hounds of Love” an album
by Kate Bush on the bed while reading Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood.” Recently I
discovered a cover version of Bush’s “Running up the Hill” performed by the electronic
music band “Chromatics” that perfectly encapsulates that sense of gloomy
solitude and stillness I experimented with while I was alone in that Florence’s
room, like if someone revisited the song I heard at that time, filtering it through
the mysterious sadness attached to my memories. Being a song writer and a singer
myself, metabolizing the emotive texture of a song becomes a sort of
instantaneous feedback that reinforce my own urge of unleashing as a music
track, a video or a painting, my personal declination of that sentiment.
If we must be grateful to art and
their living “medium”, it’s because of mutual magic like this one; and maybe,
paraphrasing Wordsworth, because it’s the only way for all of us to redeem the
chaos of feelings into the “emotion recollected in tranquillity”.
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