Daniele Formica

The Here-After meadow, 2024, cut out paintings from 1970/1980 (the original painter asks to remain anonymous)

My dear (last lover), the tragedy of stone is timeless sleep sleepless time (lost lonely sterile) DRY (our love was wet) Stillness is about the cracks (the cracks spread open like life) We put everything inside holes, even ourselves at last Then we water it>make it wet and hope that something will grow, xx Daniele

Technique: oil and gesso on linen canvas prepared with rabbit glue Size: 65 x 50 x 2 cm Authenticity: Work signed by the artist Edition: Unique work

I hire a cameraman to follow me as I perform a delirium drifting through the city of Rome. The locations are an alternation of iconic, mundane and decayed Roman places. You can see me reading marker writings on vandalized lampposts, contemplating the sky above the river Tiber or infiltrating movie sets. Being filmed contextualizes my diversity in the public space as an “act of normalcy”, allowing me to infiltrate the infra-ordinary and subversively reveal the paradoxes of our pact with reality. It is a process of claiming the public space and re-enchanting between Banalyse and magic materialism.

Daniele Formica’s Boys by the Pool series possesses a bucolic impression. The boys play around, swimming, dashing, floating, splashing. Despite their playfulness, their young male bodies become vulnerable to the most banal and conditioning element: water. Their limbs unfold in flamboyant gestures that aim to stay afloat whilst becoming an object of desire to the spectator/voyeur. Photo by Jeroen de Smalen

Drifting in a confining atmosphere with a decreasingly structuralised perception of time, his belongings started dissolving around him. The series Transformed Gifts are repurposed memorabillia that have been given a new shape and existence.

17/04/21 - 22/05/21 To swim in a pool of material belongings, plunging, drifting, whirling. The water is glistening, and so are the boys, staying afloat in the quiet streams of aquatic nostalgia. Fidgety silhouettes merge into one another, blurring the limits of their bodies. The water is inviting yet challenging, for its fluid state of being is not apt for humans to live in. Partly vulnerable, partly sensual, Formica’s boys exist in a voyeuristic vacuum where their beautiful bodies swing between subject and object by our gaze, and they coexist with repurposed memorabilia and blue introspections. In Boys by the Pool, Daniele Formica invites us to dip into his watery realm and navigate its liquidity. Daniele Formica’s new series of work follow a common thread in his practice that began last year while he was rediscovering his domestic environment. Drifting in a confining atmosphere with a decreasingly structuralised perception of time, his belongings started dissolving around him. In January this year, Formica further dived into this process in his drawing series Boys by the Pool, which originated from an attraction towards the erotic and bucolic imagery of young male figures bathing. This series evoked a new realization on the condition of floating; in Formica’s words, “liquid modernity is interpreted as a condition transforming subjects into sensual and vulnerable drifting bodies, somewhere between phenomenological victims and sentient actors playing in water.” Words abound in Formica’s work. For the artist, words are social sculptures in process, and writing is a gesture of petrifying meaning. As watery utterances, words float around in poetic efforts to anchor a liquid state of being. On the other hand, his memorabilia, from a gifted apron to an encountered leaning chair, are transformed into vessels of remembrance. As the artists says, “[his belongings] had been drifting around me all this time and finally found a tranquil shore.” Boys by the Pool presents Daniele Formica’s journey towards a sensorial and perceptual translation of the liquid state into a philosophy of being. Drawing from the mirroring quality of water, contemplating his work ultimately triggers an empathetic reflection on our own fluidness.

In the period where the artist was working on domestic sculptures, he started to look at them as if they were some parts of water closer to him in a swimming pool. When he would move his arm, the water close to him would be affected much more than the water far away. In the same way, the objects were being affected by the movements of his life. Formica started to think about life in different states of matter and what this can mean. That is where this list comes from. I made the list of actions that deal with states of matter to express such relation between English verbs and atmospheric introspections. The written text follows the physic rhythm of matter: it starts with the airy state at the top (flying), falling towards the liquid (drifting) and ending at the bottom with the solid state (anchoring). Photo by Jeroen de Smalen

<<Cinque volte racceso e tante casso lo lume era di sotto da la luna, poi che 'ntrati eravam ne l'alto passo, quando n'apparve una montagna, bruna per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto quanto veduta non avëa alcuna. Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto; ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque e percosse del legno il primo canto. Tre volte il fé girar con tutte l'acque; a la quarta levar la poppa in suso e la prora ire in giù, com'altrui piacque, infin che 'l mar fu sovra noi richiuso>>

Fabrizio de Andre sings in ‘Nella mia ora di liberta’ (In my freedom hour) that sometimes violence is more human than law. It seems to confute Kant < the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me>>, but it actually proposes that failing the moral law must also be accepted as part of being human. This is the case of the wolf. I fantasize about encounters between undefended humans and wolves. I wonder how I would imagine a wolf after an encounter in the dangers of the night, as if little red riding hood was asked to make some drawings. Fear is part of life; found outside the borders of empire."

"[...]e il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare". (And drifting is to me sweet in this sea) from Giacomo Leopardi, L’infinito. The artist was very amused to stretch a relation between the etymology of the verb naufragare (nau/frago) and the phonemic transcription of english noun "Now" (nau). Drifting and present, or litterally ship (nav) and present, are now together. The Neptune balls were collected by his family in August across the Mediterranean coast, then shipped to the Netherlands. Formica threaded them with one single blue thread. Photo by jhoeko

Laurel is a plant associated with poets, emperors and prophets. This is understood with the classical myth of Apollo and Daphne. Daphne is Greek for Laurel. The plant has been consumed as a mean to heighten perception and consult Apollo's oracle. The plant has been used as crowns to protect emperors' heads from lightings. I used it to cut out its leaves and write poems. Running together from cave to cave alludes to human history as a process of passing by between portals, transitioning.