Flavio Favelli's collages and assemblages on display in Cortina d'Ampezzo

From Aug. 1 to Sept. 10, 2023, at its Cortina d’Ampezzo venue, Farsettiarte is presenting Flavio Favelli’s special project, entitled Lessico Americano, created in collaboration with Norberto Ruggeri’s Studio SALES and introduced by a critical text by Francesco Guzzetti.

A selection of works, including collages and assemblages, made with vintage postage stamps, chocolate wrappers, vintage chewing gum wrappers and tin cans, compressions of silver plated objects and cans overshadowed by shades of spray colors, will be exhibited to delineate a path through the imagery of the reality of consumption. The works are accumulated by the use of signs, images, products and objects of past use, traceable, as the title of the exhibition suggests, to a possible “American lexicon,” understood as the language and imagery of seduction.

Favelli’s works contain not only a trace of our country’s history, but are also an expression of the artist’s personal history, in a continuous cross-reference of anecdotes, memories, fascinations and obsessions. That of duality is an aspect that characterizes the artist’s work on various levels, for example in the appearance that many of these works evoke: at first glance they communicate a sense of preciousness, but on closer examination they turn out to be characterized by the use of deliberately commonplace materials, derived from the world of industry, curio binders, and old things markets, though wrapped in glossy film, gilding or shimmering gold and silver foil that make them look like something else. In these objects the artist captures precisely the tension toward the “Eldorado,” which is manifested through the imitation of the noblest material.

Finally, there is the history of art, through a personal reinterpretation of its codes: seriality, repetition, reiteration, the use of monochrome, the “divertissement” of color shading.

“The story that the surfaces of the objects and the ideograms of the brands in the artist’s works tell,” Guzzetti writes in the catalog, “is inevitably marked by the impact of the American world on Italy. The plot of Favelli’s personal history is interwoven with the warp of the generational and collective story of those who grew up in the Italy of the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s and have memories of the country’s cultural, social and economic history from that time on.”

Hours: Daily from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 to 8 p.m.

Image: Flavio Favelli, Silver Palms, detail (2023; assemblage of tin boxes cut on panel, 65 x 52 cm). Courtesy of Farsettiarte and Studio SALES di Norberto Ruggeri, Rome.

Flavio Favelli's collages and assemblages on display in Cortina d'Ampezzo

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