Francesco Simeti

c’era una volta una guerra (gianni rodari), 2024

Gobelin fabric made on a jumbo jacquard loom. Pure virgin wool, polyester recycled from plastic waste.

340 × 420 cm

Photo Giulio Ghirardi
© Michelangelo Foundation
Installation view at Homo Faber 2024, Venice
Tapestries designed by Francesco Simeti
Interpreted and realized by Giovanni Bonotto

tu fai “pum”, e ridi; (bertold brecht), 2024

Gobelin fabric made on a jumbo jacquard loom. Pure virgin wool, polyester recycled from plastic waste.

340 × 420 cm

Photo Giulio Ghirardi
© Michelangelo Foundation
Installation view at Homo Faber 2024, Venice
Tapestries designed by Francesco Simeti
Interpreted and realized by Giovanni Bonotto

Questa Stanza non ha più Pareti, 2024

Printed ceramic slabs. Iris Ceramiche Design Your Slabs technology.

Permanent installation at Officine Saffi, Milan

Francesco Simeti’s site-specific artwork, “Questa stanza non ha più pareti,” located in the bar area of the new Fondazione Officine Saffi headquarters in Milan, serves as a ceramic decoration compendium, bridging geographical and cultural boundaries. This work encapsulates a perfect, crystallized natural landscape suspended in time, reflecting humanity’s journey through history.

The project, realized with the “Design Your Slabs” ceramic printing technology by Iris Ceramica Group, transforms large ceramic slabs into a seamless canvas. These slabs, meticulously decorated with elements drawn from the extensive history of ceramic iconography, recreate the timeless beauty of ceramics from various epochs and regions, including Etruscan, Turkish, Greek, and Italian traditions. Simeti’s work is a faithful transposition of historical decorative elements onto modern ceramic surfaces, preserving the charm and imperfections of the originals.

His composition of animal and plant subjects from terrestrial and marine habitats creates a poetic yet concrete world. These elements, derived from ancient vases, plates, terracotta, and ceramic tiles, highlight the intricate history and geographical diversity of ceramic art.

This project, which required over six months of historical and geographical research, showcases Simeti’s ability to balance empty and filled spaces, creating a harmonious collage. Nature, a recurring theme in Simeti’s work, juxtaposes the natural environment with human-made worlds, here represented in a perfect balance of earth, sea, and sky. While humans are not depicted, their presence is implied, as they inhabit the space, blending seamlessly into the natural surroundings crafted around them.

Doris and Arethusa, 2024

Glazed stoneware

45 x 38 x 7 and 44 x 40 x 8 cm

Skamandros, 2023

Glazed porcelain

35 × 38 × 35 cm

Souveniers of the Future, 2023

Pera Museum, Istanbul

Curated by Ulya Soley

Featured works:
Temple, 2023, Glazed stoneware and enamel 45 × 33 × 28 cm
Social Pyramid, 2023, Glazed stoneware 60 × 37 × 22 cm
Petting Wilderness, 2023, Print on velvet, 354 × 130 cm

Come un limone lunare, 2022

XNL Contemporanea, Piacenza

Curated by Paola Nicolin

Terrestre, 2021

Collage, ceramic sculptures and slide projection

Francesca Minini, Milano

Terrestre is a minimal expository elegy for air and water, fundamental elements for the generation of life and the organic survival of the planet – and discussed as such since the presocratic philosophical tradition – but which have become increasingly reduced in quantity and quality. While for the classical economists of the 18th century such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the forbears of the contemporary liberalism, water and air could not be assigned a monetary value because they were thought to be of unlimited quantity, Simeti has staged a troubling reflection on the precariousness of the two elements. A sense of spleen comes through in his collages, generated by an observation of sky and water that is only indirect, mediated as it is by fragile photo clippings from newspapers, images perhaps of a collective gaze that has become too myopic to see the clear need to stop the loss and impoverishment of life. […]

A sculptural group entitled Muro hinders access to one part of the gallery, made up of elements in turquoise glass paste, artifacts produced by the artist inspired by the material compositions of finds of ancient civilizations. From a form that is near to classical architectural elements, or hard biological aggregates, such as shells, in their shape, lines and color, these elements resemble the shields and body armor of modern police forces. They evoke in Simeti the apprehension, personally experienced by the artist, caused by the appearance in the streets of US cities of the “Blue Lives Matter” movement, which by parading the color of the police forces laid claim to a political dominion of a white, violent and militaristic nature. It is an insinuation that comes increasingly closer to an undefined yet alarming image, almost a Kafkian odradek, the final gloss on a process in which the artist appeals to the viewers with the silent strength of materials that are entirely terrestrial, analogue and friable, paper, terracottas and newspaper clippings.

Excerpt from the text by Luigi Fassi

Curling, arching, breaking, 2021

Print on cotton
 
Installation view in occasion of PANORAMA,
curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, Procida, Italy.
 
A project by ITALICS

Curling, arching, breaking is the first of a series of works about water, intended both as a fundamental resource and as a hostile and dangerous element.

The apparently poetic and romantic veil of the project conceals a critical reading that leads the observer to reflect on the relationship between man and nature and on his delicate balance.

Simeti’s site-specific project was conceived for the island, in particular for the Vascello district, and was born thanks to a profound dialogue with its inhabitants. The artist enters the homes of the Procidans and replaces their clothes – usually hung out to dry in the sun – with his digital collages printed on fabric.

Unrelenting, 2020

Video animation, 5′
 
Projection on the façade of the Italian Consulate in NYC

Unrelenting is a 5 minutes long video animation that Francesco Simeti originally created for Homemade, the Magazzino da Casa’s digital program, over a two-month duration, during the global quarantine in the spring of 2020.

During the fall the video was then projected on the facade of the Italian Consulate in NYC as a one night event during the second wave of the pandemic.

Francesco Simeti’s practice has long been interested in the tension between the natural world and the built environment, attuned to the fragility of this balance and how one can eclipse the other at any moment. For Homemade, the artist started the project with an interest in how, with the absence of humans, animals and plants began to reclaim spaces. Swans and fish reinhabited canals in Venice again; coyotes took to the streets of San Francisco; spring flowers bloomed all over. All the while, humans have retreated indoors and become more dependent on technology to connect to the external world. In his animated video works, Simeti used new methods to capture this moment of uncanny overlap, with plants palimpsest over another, creating a mysterious composition that processes our new reality.

You can find the video at the following link:
https://vimeo.com/440679184

Uncinata, 2018

Belgian unglazed stoneware
90 x 48 x 35 cm

Museo Carlo Zauli, Faenza, Italy

The shape of a particular kind of leaf inspired the title of this installation: uncinata (hooked), in Italian, a term of botanic morphology which denotes the hooked appearance of certain leaves, while alluding to the artist’s work on halberds, which he has been pursuing for some years now.

Francesco Simeti, assisted by the ceramist Aida Bertozzi, used the same black clay Carlo Zauli worked with for his most famous artworks, to create two totemic sculptures and a few three-dimensional “collages”, laden with leaves sculpted by him during his residency at the museum together with others sculpted starting from pre-existing moulds, founded at local workshops.

Swell, 2017

Site-specific installation, printed panels, tracks, robots

Installation view at Open Source, Brooklyn

This exhibit has been kindly supported by the New York Council on the Arts. Extended programming is presented in collaboration with Gowanus Canal Conservancy, Brooklyn Urban Garden Charter School (BUGS), HomeGrown and City Parks Foundation/ Partnership for Parks.

Francesco Simeti presents Swell, a theatrical installation at Open Source Gallery that explores human impact on the environment. In Swell, Simeti transforms appropriated images from Brooklyn waterways, such as the Gowanus Canal, into a motorized installation in which the public can contemplate the consequences of human activity on our surroundings. The Gowanus Canal was built in the mid-1800s as an industrial transportation route. All of waste discharged into the canal over time has made the Gowanus Canal into one of the nation’s most seriously contaminated bodies of water. The canal was declared a Superfund site in 2010 yet remains the home of industrial factories, small businesses, artist studios and rapidly gentrifying residential areas. Currently the bottom of the canal is coated to a layer of toxic sediment– nicknamed “black mayonnaise” –that averages 10 feet thick, reaching 20 feet in some places. In a twist of irony, this sludge resembles a noxious primordial soup and microbes have evolved to live off the pollution. It seems that the canal has not only become uninhabitable for wildlife, but could be breeding new and previously unidentified organisms uniquely adapted to their putrid environment.

The diametrically opposed elements present in the history of the canal–life and death, order and destruction, reality and fiction, the light-hearted and the devastating–mirror Simeti’s practice, which amplifies multifaceted environmental, social and political concerns into an immersive, kinetic installation. Swell uses ornament and subtext as an instrument of political critique. Playful historical images of Coney Island rides and other human intervention along the water intertwine with scenes of flora and fauna that once flourished along the Gowanus Canal. Adopting a DIY aesthetic, Simeti takes inspiration from puppet theater and Baroque mechanical automata, which combined an awe of nature with an affinity for artifice, to explore the social, cultural and historical significance of Brooklyn waterways. Combining the installation with workshops, collaborative projects and partnerships with local organizations, Swell engages with the consequences of human activity on a local level, depicting nature as both a playground and a battle zone, and encourages action. Visitors are invited to explore different avenues of inquiry, taking time for self-reflection while simultaneously connecting with their community and its history.