Federico Solmi
Federico Solmi’s animated video King Kong and the End of the World (2006, edition of 10) plays with several icons. Commercial brands, emblems of high culture (such as the Guggenheim Museum), are co-mingled with the phallus-hypertrophy, an object/symbol common in his videos, paintings and sculptures. It is a device which has also been used as fetish by other outsiders, such as the 19th century British Art Nouveau illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and the sado-masochistic comic book draftsman Nazario. It is easy to deduce that King Kong functions as the alter ego of the artist, who frequently recognizes the profound influence of living in New York in his work. King Kong, besieged and trapped by the urban landscape, loses control and destroys even what he loves (the EGOsian Gallery) until he is shot and killed. The rage and impotence felt before such an insane and voracious society forces the artist to reward himself by representing the city under a rain of urine. Solmi´s work expresses through fantasy the defenseless feeling of this neurotic urban landscape. King Kong and the End of the World ends, however, with a twist of hope: the artist and his wife are elected by God to repopulate the Earth. Federico stains the biblical episode of Adam and Eve, giving the man an enormous phallus.