FEDERICO FIORENTINI / Italian, born in 1972
WORKS
"MEMORY AND ITS MARKS"
My paintings must contain a story, an undisclosed story.
In my travels and in my encounters I accumulate and archive images that I will later be able to transform into paintings. The intention is to give the figures a new existence, nourished by memory... Portraits that evoke past times, distant worlds.
The starting point is the photographic reality. But in my paintings there is no will to copy the photographic image with hyperrealist trait. Through subsequent painting process I seek a result that, while leaning on reality, moves away from it, softening into imperfection.
The often obsessive work of pictorial reproduction of buildings, empty cars, figures and geometries is my attempt to find a language capable of giving me back a little poetry. Emptiness, sense of time, timelessness, memory and its marks, lack, absence, silence, suspension, illusion are all elements that can be extrapolated from a photographic image and translated into painting.
In my paintings the observer is a solitaire moving around the world and looking at it. And from time to time, he stops his gaze on something or someone.
PATH
Federico Fiorentini was born in Milan in 1972. He spent most of his childhood in California, before returning with his family to Italy, to Lucca and then Florence. After graduating from the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in sculpture, he turned to painting a few years later, making it his specialty.
Driven by a constant need to travel, over the years he settled in San Francisco, New York, Bali, Berlin and Elba, before finally settling in the city where his art was born : Florence.
EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
2019 : Federico Fiorentini, personal exhibition, Galleria Pananti Casa d’Aste, Florence, Italy
2014 : Federico Fiorentini, personal exhibition, Spazio Poggio Imperiale, Florence, Italy
2012 : Colors of the city, personal exhibition, Above Second Gallery, Hong Kong
2010 : Demone a ciascuno il suo sogno, group exhibition, Palazzo Chigi Zondadari, San Quirico d'Orcia, Italy
2009 : Art-Retenville, personal exhibition, Centre Culturel Christiane Peugeot, Paris, France
2009 : Dalla Strada, personal exhibition, Galleria Margutta 102, Rome, Italy
2008 : Figure, personal exhibition, Galleria Pananti Casa d’Aste, Florence, Italy
2007 : In Chiantiere, group exhibition, Palazzo Malaspina, San Donato in Poggio, Italy
2004 : Collettiva Secondopiano, group exhibition, Palazzo Antinori Corsini, Florence, Italy
"A STORY THAT IS FINISHED" - by Luca S. Verrone
Characters appear on the canvas like coming from faraway, evocative, pale, tender figures from Hades. They stand on the edge of the void, that is depicted by huge, abstract, hazy backgrounds.
Everything in his paintings seems gone, like the past reappearing. The observer is like someone who turns the pages of an old photo album: a sort of melancholy tenderness, a wondering smile about life fragility. Contours are well sketched out, they stand time; precise lines hold the volumes of the bodies, but their color seems evaporated, faded even or veiled.
Through his work, Fiorentini offers to open a space for a poetic reflection on time. Like ancient paintings these works speak, giving us a subtle emotion of a world that existed and does not exist anymore, of a life that comes to us like the warmth of a distant flame.
