ADN Galería


King Kong and the End of the World (2005) is a four-minute video animation of about 1.100 mix-media drawings on paper. It is the result of collaboration between this self-taught artist and the 3D artist Russell LOWE, conceived as the remake of the original movie dating from 1933. The piece combines the original plot with anachronisms that spark our imagination. The characters are the stereotypical disoriented anti-heroes, in search for identity and forced to live in a hostile, ruthless, and frenzy society. Solmi represents the ruin of present urban life to emphasize our neurotic way of living, hectic and pregnant with dichotomies and contradictions. The animation was shown for the first time in December 2005 at Pulse Fair, Miami. It was also screened at the Guggenheim of New York during a conference regarding emergent artists, and will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art of St. Etienne, France, in October 2006. Artist’s Statement As an untiring observer of the alienated scenery of the metropolitan reality, I am focusing, in my installations and videos, to analyse the paradoxical situation that modifies our approach and our attitude toward everyday life. The neurotic urban landscape, the frenetic life in the big city and the colossal contradiction of contemporary society, are the key themes on which my artistic search has been based. The universe that I like to represent is the exaltation of a present that is crumbling. It is also a criticism of a system that approves and trusts without questioning the fragile foundation on which our culture and post-modernist society is based. To be completely honest, I am not interested to transfer to canvas the most important facts that are sculpting our age. I absolutely not consider myself a chronicler of the current days. On the contrary, I am simply using the contemporary events to confuse and to “disinform” the viewers.	Wolf Hamm´s new work vaguely refers to the old engravings and xylographs of Durero, Schongauer o Baldung Grien, yet it also offers a whole range of aesthetic solutions; in the artist´s words: “we always build upon what it is already there”. Wolf Hamm utilizes drawings as the departing point to clarify something, to convey an idea, “the first step is to introduce ideas that later will be elaborated. Their strength resides in their initial vagueness,” as he affirms. His black lines and dots are restless and the final composition seems to be imprisoned by an invisible hand. As a result, the stories fight to spring from abstracted passages, although the final outcome is always under control. Wolf Hamm seems to dig from religious themes: the original sin, resurrection, salvation, the hope for everlasting life; he mingles them with everyday observations documented in his notebooks. His subject matters come, as he says, from the streets, the subway, bars, “indeed from every place where people gather and hold casual meetings.” After completing his fine-art studies, he has extensively travelled thanks to several scholarships and artist residences in German and Spanish institutions. In Spain he has mainly shown in the Basque Country thanks to his collaboration with Bilbao Arte
Caín y Abel oprimidos Mery Cuesta Drawing as medium goes nowadays through a sweet moment among the coming and going of artistic taste and the market. It is not so extrange considering the unstopable phagocyting process of low culture (cartoon, rock, techno, grafitti) by the realm of hight culture, which for a long time has undertood contemporary artistic practices as a close series of specifc mediums (painting, sculpture, videoart, installation art). Let it as it may be, nowadays drawing is celebrated everywhere thanks to its enormous potencial as a vivid, hybrid, and spontaneous way of expression. ADN Galería presents the work of two artist that share the use of the same medium, drawing, yet they diverge in their approach and process, and apparently, in their discourse. We will finally see, however, that in the end our Cain and Abel will converge in the same idea. Federico Solmi ( Bologna , 1973) deserves the role of Cain of the couple. Solmi enters the artistic world coming for the outsider realm. His work revels this fact, not only for the themes he chooses (popular, inconoclastic with amusing twists), but also in his frank style with scratches and messy in character, with a Dadaist sensibility, even absurd at times. Solmi is obsessed with sex and reproduction, corcerned by the contradictions of urban live; practices satire and venerates Rocco Sifredi (the pornstar that develops the role of the hero in his former video animation Rocco Never Dies), subject matters indeed that bleed, sweat, cum, and touch us for pure instinct and nature. Solmi´s work crosses the work of the damned Raymond Pettibone, the theories of fluid and anti-nature parings of the philosophers Deleuze and Guatarri, and relates in kindship to the filmmaking of Cronenberg. Solmi presents in ADN Galería his last video animation, King Kong and The End Of The World , as well as some drawings among the 1100 originally utilized for the making of the movie. This piece plays with several ikons of mass culture: the comercial brands, emblems of high culture as the Guggenheim Museum, mingled with some props and attrezzos common in his works: the monstruosity of the phallus, hypertrophy used as fetiche by other outsiders as the decadent illustrator Berdsley or the draftsman Nazario. Is it easy to deduce King Kong functions as the alter ego of the astist, who frequently recognices the profound influence in his work by the fact of living in New York . King Kong, besieged and trapped by the urban scape, losses control and destroys even what he loves (the Gagosian Gallery) until he is shut and killed. The rage and impotence, felt before such an insane and voracious society, forces the artists to reward himself by representing the city under a rain of urine. Solmi´s work is fresh and expresses through fantasy the defenseless feeling before the neurotic urban scape. King Kong and the End of The Worls, ends, however, with a twist of hope: the artist and his wife are elect by God to repopulate the Earth. Our punkish Cain stains the biblical episode of Adam and Eve giving the man an enormous phallus. Abel, nevertheless, interprets the Bible in a very different way. Wolf Hamm ( Bremen , 1974) - our disciplined Abel - has developed his career within the German and Finish academic circuits. Advanced apprentice and experimenter of long-standing techniques like the skecth of the xylopraph. This artists identifies himself as follower of Durero and the engravers Schongauer and Balgung Grien, manifests to be fond of Flamish painting, and falls in love with the gloomiest facet os xylography, which trapped as well the Mexican engravers Posada, Manilla among others. Hamm explores the interior landscape: believes, faith, the human condition indeed. In order to do so he focusess on religious and transcendental subject-matters, especially Biblical passages. Yet, he does not approach them literally, by reproducing its iconography, but reinterpreting them in contemporary fashion, subtly alluding back to the original passage in a semi-abstract style: "Unpreciseness of drawing constitute its own strength", afirms Hamm . His entanglements provoke on us certain questions, a sort of meditative state, a trance where the fight of dichotomies manifests: evil against goodness, darkness against clarity. The xylographs Hamm presents at ADN Galería are inhabited by figures that support internat tension, mingled and almost eaten by darkness. Hamm is a dedicated and perseverent, thoughtfull Abel. Just the contrary of the unruled Solmi. Nevertheless, as we mentioned above, there is an aspect in which, from diverging points of view, they converge: both use the lack of liberty as departing point. The abrupt characters of Hamm and Solmi´s King Kong fight for liberation, for breaking the chains apart of which oppresses the individual, whether is comes for the inside or the outside.