Federico Solmi: Ship Of Fools

Imagine you’re watching the cacophony of action-packed scenes rapidly and randomly bumped up against one another in the trailer for Federico Fellini’s already disorienting film Juliet of the Spirits and suddenly you find yourself actually in the film; it has become reality! That’s the best way I can describe the sensation of Federico Solmi’s exhibition Solmi - Ship Of Fools at the Venice Biennale (Palazzo Dona’ Dalle Rose, Fondamente Nova). I want to follow four threads in this profound body of work: the issue of political satire, the drive in and behind the pioneering formal innovation in these works, the urgency of narrative, and finally what this work means as a model of a life in art.

“If your idea of art is not something that involves creating objects to decorate the apartments of the privileged classes, it’s obvious that your work is automatically one of denunciation and social critique,”¹ Solmi told exhibition co-curator Renato Miracco. Political satire goes back to the comedies of Aristophanes and motivated some of the greatest artists in art history, among them some of Solmi’s heroes like Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Théodore Géricault, and Diego Rivera. In The Plumb Pudding in Danger or State Epicures Taking a Petit Souper, of February 26, 1805 James Gillray provides a classic example in perhaps the most famous political cartoon of all time (also formally a great work of art), showing Napoleon Bonaparte carving up the world with the English statesman William Pitt. Gillray derisively depicts the diminutive Napoleon having to stand to reach the table. Daumier’s A Model Assembly or Unity Makes Strength, from his News of the Day, published in Le Charivari, August 19, 1871, sarcastically lampoons French legislators; but we admire it today as much for its masterful line as for its hilarious wit.

Solmi singled out Géricault’s 1819 The Raft of the Medusa as an inspiration for his Ship of Fools: “What I see in his painting,” he said, “is revolutionary social commentary at a time when history painting was expected to celebrate national identity and military triumph.”² In Solmi’s reinterpretation he filled “the raft with a group of contemporary tycoons, influencers, politicians, and historical leaders...[who], responsible for the vessel’s destiny, give into wanton self-indulgence and obliviousness. Seated apart, at the rear of the boat, are three contemplative figures who hold a lantern—the poets, our saviours.”³

Solmi’s single channel video, The Gracious Host, Donald Trump, (2024) relies on a vivid expressionism to satirize his subject, like the anti-war series by the California Funk artist Robert Arneson, who also tackled a serious subject in his 1986 drawing, The Colonel’s at It Again. Solmi’s “masks are neither portraits nor caricatures, but a distillation of the worst of us,” Dorothy Kosinski wrote in her outstanding catalogue essay. “Whether an anonymous pope, the Empress Theodora, Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Hernàn Cortés, or Donald Trump, they are interchangeable bad actors.”⁴ The Schemers of 2017 combines a video loop on an LED screen with thickly painted acrylic and gold leaf. In addition to this lineage of great artists doing satire, Solmi points to writers as well who “always had a big impact on me like, Aldous Huxley, Jonathan Swift, Alfred Jarry, George Orwell, Nicolai Gogol, artists such James Ensor (especially in my early days) all satirists...[and] the political work of Peter Saul, Leon Golub, and Nancy Spero.”⁵

Solmi’s The Great Farce, Portable Theater of 2017 combines digital video with a thickly painted surface surrounding it. But he also carries the gestural style into the video. “I am able to give an organic texture to my digital world by scanning hand painted work on paper,” he told me, and then loading it into a digital and gaming world—something he began doing twenty years ago. “Digital technology has no empathy,” he explained, “and you have to add that with hand drawing.”⁶ He even makes hand painted backdrops like the movie sets Fellini made at Cinecittà. (The inspiration of Cinéma d’auteur lies behind all of Solmi’s work.)

Solmi recruited gifted young graduate students in computer technologies from Carnegie Mellon, who used a system Unity, a cross-platform graphics engine normally used to create the digital environments in video games.⁷ Solmi fearlessly pushes the boundaries of technology and transforms it with hand-rendering into something quite human. In Solmi’s video loops, the coarse handling of the paint, combined with the jerky movements of the figures makes them look like puppet theater but also game-engine animation. In creating his video-world Solmi used actors, recording them using motion capture. His style of combining these languages of gestural painterliness and digital technology in video is unique.

Meanwhile, in a recent series, he depicts life-size, sculptural figures, with massive bodies drawn like 3D graphics wireframe constructions, ready for digital animation. Their sobriety belies their pop culture references—Kardashian, Oprah, Buffett, Musk. Solmi paints these white on dark monumental compositions in pastel and gouache, with white pencil tracings. “Decontextualized and deprived of their clothes/masks,”⁸ Davide Sarchioni writes, the characters seem to expose their underlying digital identities; the glowing halos around them underscore their theatrical artificiality.

Like the strange and theatrical paintings of James Ensor, Solmi’s art is at once serious and comical. “We suppress our temptation to laugh,” Kosinski wrote, as Punch wields his paddle “with a gleeful thwack…Punch’s wanton violence has an unsettling edge… We gaze in surprise and revulsion at what we come to perceive as an unsettling mirror.”⁹ The stocatto movements hearken back to Charlie Chaplin. “I was very interested in silent films,” Solmi explained, “because the fact the actor could not speak forced him to make extreme gestures.”¹⁰ “I consider the cinema to be very important,” he continued, “because I immediately understood that the best way to tell a story was to use animated drawing,…it is a language that makes you feel human, as if your grandfather were telling you a story.”¹¹

The works evolve first by identifying a theme for a new project. Then he does collages and sketches on paper to create a story board as for a film. He creates digital character models based on his sketches with hand-painted textures, scans them, and maps them onto the digital models. This allows Solmi to blow them up into totally immersive environments on large screens. The Great Farce premiered in giant display windows along a street in Frankfurt Germany and he also commanded the screens in Times Square for another such project. But since no museum could exhibit a work on that large scale, he came up with the idea of creating a portable version that could be displayed in a museum: The Great Farce Portable Theater. Technically it was an edition of five, but each edition was hand painted and they were all very different. (So far he has only completed three.)

As a young man, Solmi was looking at frescoes on the ceilings of private homes at night, walking home from work. He admired the ambitious frescoes of Anibale Carracci in Bologna and Rome and he experienced the frescoes of Giotto (1303 and 1305) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua as immersive environments. “From the start I was interested in exposing with my narratives the contradictions and injustices of American society, but of course I wanted to do it my way with my own tools, using a completely new medium. I found myself immersed in the digital realm, because it offered me millions of new possibilities.” Then around 2017, while teaching at Yale, “I began my first artwork made for the Virtual Reality experience. This medium in particular provided the key I needed. I realized that it allows the spectator to enter a new dimension...there is no beginning and there is no end. The spectator has the power to finish the work.”¹²

“No contemporary artist has ever come closer [than] Giorgio de Chirico,” Solmi noted to the concept of the “metaverse: the images he produced in 1917/18 were already dated 2025.”¹³ Formally the development from his hybrid of video and hand-painting, by way of computer games— in particular Grand Theft Auto which was literally but coincidentally shot on his street in Brooklyn—evolved naturally to the even more immersive VR experience. The exhibition in Venice includes a VR Roman bathhouse. It draws audiences of ordinary people because it’s entertaining; Solmi sees the effect on young people of the Oculus Quest 2-VR headsets with controllers, combined with his empathic draftsmanship as a “nuclear bomb.”¹⁴

Solmi described the bathhouse this way:

Inspired by ancient mythology, modern myth, and contemporary celebrity culture, The Bacchanalian Ones compares the historical myth with a satirical mash-up of the powerful self-absorbed who preen and wallow in a banal spectacle of their own creation. In a fantastically opulent setting of unrestrained hedonism, political, religious, and military leaders with ghoulish, buffoonesque appearances are surrounded by social elite sycophants like the devotees of the cults of Bacchus and Dionysus.¹⁵

Empowered by interactive Virtual Reality, the bathhouse viewer can enter the phantasmagoric world of whirling space, jerking movement, and oscillating facades that overwhelm the viewer’s visual field. The viewer picks the perspective of one of the historical avatars and controls the narrative, experiencing the debauchery up close. Among the characters in the pool: George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Donald Trump, Chief Sitting Bull, Napoleon, Bismarck, Montezuma, Ramesses II, Empress Theodora, Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Pope Benedict XVI, Julius Caesar, Marie Antionette, Robert E. Lee, Socrates, Hernàn Cortés, Benjamin Franklin, Benito Mussolini, Idi Amin, and Garibaldi. Solmi’s critiques of American culture in particular was fed by avidly reading history. In particular, Eduardo Galleano’s Open Veins of Latin America and Howard Zinn’s controversial A People’s History of the United States had a particularly memorable effect. But unlike earlier political satire, Solmi’s work aims to unsettle the viewer rather than focus on a clear point of view.

“Solmi moves in what is sometimes called the ’dreams of painters,’ a place where contradictory aleatory figures coexist and in the end converge in a representation that unveils a new truth,”¹⁶ Miracco points out. Solmi prioritizes narrative, but a destabilized one in which he flattens the characters as reconfigurable units on the plane of the image. The computer futurist Lev Manovich, in his famous essay, “Database as Symbolic Form” (1999), pointed out that “new media objects do not tell stories; they don’t have a beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.”¹⁷

Miracco likens Solmi’s big screens, like those in Times Square and Frankfurt, to murals and cites Solmi: “my role is to use artworks to generate doubt in the spectators immersed in official narrative. I feel this is my mission.”¹⁸ Miracco continues by saying that Solmi communicates his “political outlook through mural works intended to redirect history.”¹⁹ Solmi notes that to arouse feeling and provoke insight in the public, he himself must be emotionally and imaginatively committed. The artistic imagination has the task of resisting every form of reification. The imaginative function opens up the field of possibilities beyond current perceptions of reality. The artist creates a form that subverts systems of legitimacy and unmasks power. Solmi embeds his message in a metaverse. The artist’s domain liberates by destabilizing the images and space. Living in indeterminate space (the non-places of Solmi’s videos and virtual reality) means keeping the field of potentiality open.

Solmi told Larry Ossei-Mensah,

I try to remain optimistic because making art makes me feel alive. With the exhibition, I hope to be able to engage with the pubic, plant a seed in people’s minds that might make them question the official narrative. Of course, the idea that a work of art can overthrow a government is too optimistic. But I do believe that artists, writers, poets, and filmmakers have tremendous power. They can light a spark.²⁰

Solmi is a remarkable artist and a remarkable human being. He is driven to find ever more totalizing means for his world of imagination. He will throw himself into whatever new technology holds promise, undaunted, and he’ll find a way to master it. Like Giulietta Boldrini, the protagonist in Fellini’s film, he steps wide-eyed into the world hungrily learning. Landing in New York at the age of twenty-five with a small savings, no university education, not even speaking English, he wasn’t overwhelmed; on the contrary America, he said, gave him the opportunity to invent his artistic metaverse. Reinvention is central to the American myth. Solmi turned his lack of material resources and preparation into a metaphysical advantage because he wasn’t saddled with the hierarchies of thinking that a "trained” artist has to overcome. He worked in the family butcher shop in Bologna and in the market as a young man and had little access to books or time for university studies. But his father, who sadly died young, nevertheless left his sons a remarkable inheritance: a powerful work ethic and resilience. Solmi’s undaunted belief in his increasingly immersive vision, his irresistible optimism and talent, gave him the opportunity to invent a life.

1. Federico Solmi, quoted Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 60.
2. Federico Solmi, in “A Conversation Between Federico Solmi and Larry Ossei-Mensah,” Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 88.
3. Federico Solmi, in “A Conversation Between Federico Solmi and Larry Ossei-Mensah,” Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 88.
4. Dorothy Kosinski, “Masked Marauders! Humanity Adrift In Our Storm-Tossed Boat,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 38.
5. Federico Solmi, email to the author, May 27, 2024.
6. Federico Solmi zoom conversation with the author, May 31, 2024.
7. As discussed in Davide Sarchioni, “Synthesizing Digital Innovation and Artistic Vision,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 94.
8. Davide Sarchioni, “Synthesizing Digital Innovation and Artistic Vision,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 94.
9. Dorothy Kosinski, “Masked Marauders! Humanity Adrift In Our Storm-Tossed Boat,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 37. She cites: “That’s the Way to Do it, a History of Punch and Judy,” Victoria and Albert Museum website, https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/thats-the-way-to-do-it-a-history-of-punch-and-judy
10. Federico Solmi, quoted Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 64.
11. Federico Solmi, quoted Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 64.
12. Federico Solmi, quoted Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 62.
13. Federico Solmi, quoted Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 63.
14. Federico Solmi zoom conversation with the author, May 31, 2024.
15. Federico Solmi, email to the author, June 1, 2024.
16. Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 64.
17. Manovich, L. (1999). Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence, 5(2), 80. https://doi.org/10.1177/135485659900500206
18. Federico Solmi, quoted in Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 55.
19. Renato Miracco, “Solmi, A Twenty-First-Century Muralist,” in Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 60.
20. Federico Solmi, in “A Converation Between Federico Solmi and Larry Ossei-Mensah,” Dorothy Kosinski and Renato Miracco, Solmi: Ship of Fools (Rome: Gangemi Editore, 2024), 88.