Francesco Simeti

Francesco Simeti’s appropriates and digitally modifies newspaper and magazine clippings from war scenes and other violent acts and re-arranges them in repetitive sequences to create images with a deliberately decorative element, that conceal an alarming sub-text. In this way, he comments on the aestheticisation of violence but also on the way in which the media often reduce horrific events to trivial episodes. Simeti is concerned with the way we consume images and information through the media but also the way that media information has different meanings or repercussions for different groups of people. Now I Know my ABC's, Next time won't you sing with me?, for example, is a series of digital prints representing a pictorial alphabet, where each letter is visualized by a picture and a word that accompanies it as in any child's book of ABC’s, except that Simeti’s images and words are an alphabet of violence and destruction. Artificio, on the other hand, is an archive of images of explosions, which are not necessarily recongniseable as such. The images hover between beauty and horror, between the realistic and the simulated, leaving the viewer in apprehension as to their genealogy. At the same time, they retain the iconic status and spectacular quality of their typology.

Now I Know My ABC..., 2003 / 26 Epson archival prints on cardboard / 30 x 30 cm each/
Courtesy the artist and Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia

www.galleriaminini.it