ENDOMETRIA SPEAKS ENGLISH

 

It has been a long and adventurous challenge, but at last the English translation of my dark fantasy novel “Endometria” written and illustrated in 2007 is no more a fantasy. The eBook version including the illustrations of the first edition and new unreleased ones, the appendix with the backstory “The Veil of the Night” and several essays and notes is currently available on Amazon in Kindle format. Though, if you belong to those who still prefer to leaf through the rustling pages while smelling the fragrance of the freshly printed paper, don’t despair: the paperback version will be available shortly after. Having forgotten the years of the imprisonment by the Veil of Night, now Edel and Arnel reign on a new marquisate, far from the wars plaguing the realm of Lantaria. Despite their harmonious life, the epicenter of the chaos that is about to fall on the entire continent, is pulsating at the root of their love.

What’s the origin of the seed hidden inside the beak of the bird “franofelus”? Who are the acolytes of the Ancient Whisper? Why the monks of Garras have left their monastery to build new cathedrals in the city of Antalide? The ancient race of Aledani was really extinct along with their dark power? It will be up to Arnel to face, through his flesh, the hurricanes of memory in which the mystery of the “Eulatma children” is waiting to lash out.

 

Whispers from Teetotum

 

AFAN Alessandro Fantini

Whispers from Teetotum

Oil on canvas, 40×40 cm. (2021)

 

 

Droplets Arcade

AFAN alessandro Fantini

DROPLETS ARCADE

Oil on canvas, 40x50 cm.

(2020)

Open for commissions

  

https://www.deviantart.com/afantini/

 

Since I regularly get requests for affordable portraits and illustrations I thought to enable an online option allowing to submit your commissions through the Deviantart verified service. Currently you can commission black and white or color graphic art as high resolution digital files. All you need to do is to register as a Deviantart user (in case you aren't one yet), converting your money in points and select the desired commission. Check it out and let me know if it's a viable system for satisfying your artistic desires.

 

Leonardo or the irreplaceable sequence

Although I find it stingy to establish hierarchies when it comes to Art, I would not hesitate to put the whole human and creative story of Leonardo da Vinci at the top of my "pantheon".

Indelible is the memory of that huge tome dedicated to his work I received as a Christmas present in 1986. It wasn’t  the paintings, drawings or codes written with specular handwriting, that immediately impressed me, but the superhuman effort, largely disregarded, that Leonardo had accomplished throughout his life in tracing his intimate cosmogony, made even more heroic and romantic by  the state of draft of many of his most ambitious visions.

 

Later, I was fascinated by how that sense of sublime incompleteness, which found an admirable representation in the use of chiaroscuro, was rooted in biographical experience, reverberating in the enigma of his sexual identity. It was especially in the morphological whims of his drawings of storms, anatomical sections, battles and caricatures that I identified the germ of what would become my passion for graphic fantasies and visual inventions so familiar even to the painting of Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel and William Kurelek. In the same period, I found that calligraphic wit and colour mastery in the illustrations soaked with fairy-tale realism dedicated to the life of the Gnomes by the Dutch Rien Poortvliet, an artist who should be counted among the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century. It was along this path that I finally reached the reign of Freudian fetishes, delirious hyperrealism and atmospheric compressions by Salvador Dali, galvanized as well by Leonardo and Bosch in the gestation of his stylistic code. A deoxyribonucleic chain of which Leonardo will always remain the most irreplaceable and acid "sequence".

Seeking absolutley nothing (Death and life of Salvador Dali)

Figueres 11-5-1904
Figueres 23-1-1989
Valle de la Sangre 23-1-2019

During the winter of 1992 I found myself walking in front of an open-air bookshop by the seafront of Pescara. I was looking for a book about cats. On the shelf above the volumes dedicated to felines, I saw a cover in which a bald man seemed to look for something at his feet, standing against a wide semi-desert landscape whose perspective receded to the sea horizon. It was the Salvador Dali's painting "The Pharmacist of Ampurdan seeking absolutely nothing”. And that was the cover of one of the first monographs published after his death. By a meaningful coincidence, someone had recently created a chalk fresco copy of Dali's "Corpus Hypercubicus" on the near square dominated by the Pietro Cascella's fountain "The ship". Until then I didn’t know so much about him. At 7 I just read a brief bio in an old book while stuck in bed for recovering from a fever. In the same period, I glanced at a framed print of “Woman with a head of roses” in the dim light of a room in my maternal uncle’s house. I felt there was something familiar and ominous in the mood of that image, as if it was a slide flickering from an age (not a different life) I lived prior to my childhood. That archaic feeling haunted my infancy, making me enjoy more the mysteries of places and books evoking solitude and distant past than the company of my playmates. Sometime when I was sick and alone in my bed leafing through artbooks, my cat stared at me from behind the glass of the French window. Only that non-human presence was able to share and preserve the magic of that solitude.
Somehow it was fateful that, while looking for a manual about cats I ended up buying one about the quest for nothing.
That enthralling Nothing was waiting to be populated by the hidden fauna swarming in the sea of Time in front of me.

Will the night ever fall down?

 AFAN Alessandro Fantini 

- Will the night ever fall down?

oil on canvas, 25x35 cm. (2018)

Ibis REDibis

 

(Ibis) REDibis (non morieris)

Oil and glitter gouache on canvas, 30x90 cm. 2018

AFAN's DISPLATES

https://displate.com/afantini

About untraced artistic paths

My answers to the fineartamerica.com interview:

1. If someone were to film a documentary about your life, how would the story go?

Actually, since my adolescence I started writing a sort of screenplay of my own life, just like I was aware I was going to shoot it by myself at a later stage in my existence. Indeed in 2012 I’ve directed a bio-documentary about my artistic path up until that year. The opening scenes showed the landscape of the Sangro Valley in Middle Italy, where I was born and where I currently live. The image of the Sangro river (from the Spanish word “sangre” meaning “blood”) starting from the snowy mountains and ending in the Adriatic Sea, is presented as a metaphor of the inner stream of visions and irrational desires nurturing my creative quest from childhood to these days. Somehow every painting, movie, musical composition and novel I’ve created until now could be defined as a blood cell floating along the mystical side of the river. Therefore, the topography of the valley could be used as an allegorical map of my own human and artistic odyssey.

2. What were your biggest triumphs and challenges? What decisions did you make that shaped or changed the direction of your life? Who influenced or mentored you along the way?

To be honest I think that nowadays the fact of being a creative person is a challenge itself. No one will take your artistic vocation seriously until you’re able to show that you’re making a living with it. Maybe the biggest triumph is when you’re completely free to create without being forced to constantly show or explain what and why you’re working on certain projects. Choosing to not become a teacher or a factory employee after graduating with honours to keep working on my artworks, was the most important and daring decision I’ve taken in my life (however in Italy is hard to make a career as a university teacher without the support of a family of teachers or influent people).
I’ve always been a self-taught artist. Aside of the lessons of masters such as Vermeer, Dalì, Magritte, Giger, Wyeth, Kubrick, Bunuel, Lynch, over the years no one influenced or taught me anything useful. On the contrary, I must thank every art critic or professional working in the arts and showbiz who tried to convince me that an artistic career was a colossal waste of time. In a certain sense, the sheer amount of art I’ve produced over the last two decades is even the natural feedback to the defeatism surrounding me. It’s like I need to create an imaginary world where I can find a shelter from the nihilism and the brutal pragmatism of contemporary society, allowing me to give an aesthetic interpretation of the latter.

3. Did you pursue your childhood dreams, and are you happy with where your life is at today?

Being an artist means preserving the playful anarchy of the childhood. Only in this attractive chaos it’s possible to exert the freedom to create new rules and aesthetic dimensions. Like Nietzsche once wrote, maturity means rediscovering the seriousness one had as a child at play. The artistic activity is the better way to preserve it. Though, happiness isn’t a term relatable to the creative process. For me the main motivation of an artist life is to constantly challenge the boundaries of his own “safety zone”. That basically means living in a persistent yet voluptuous state of prolific anguish.

Nephesh (stronghold of the zonedout)

Nephesh -. Stronghold of zonedout, oil on canvas, 60x40 cm. (2018)

AFANzine - Pre-Raphaelites

AFANzine - Art as told by AFAN Alessandro Fantini Pre-Raphaelites In 1848 three friends started the most revolutionary "reactionary" movement in the history of Art: the “Pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood”, inspired by the bright simplicity and linear purity of Medieval art and Italian painting before the mannerist style developed after Raphael.

 Between video-magazine and documentary, informative program and video-art, in this series conceived and produced for the web, the multimedianic artist AFAN Alessandro Fantini browses the art currents and the artists who have contributed to its aesthetic training over the years, affecting the development of his personal multi-faceted approach to creativity.

ENTRAPENSA

ENTRAPENSA

Oil on canvas, 40x50 cm. (2018)

My "Blade Runner 2049" oil painting featured by Sylvia Hoeks

— BLU-RAY IS HERE — ✨✨✨Absolutely LOVE this oil on canvas by Alessandro Fantini @afanmultimedianic ✨ that I’m posting in honor of @bladerunnermovie coming out on BLU-RAY TODAY 🙏🏼💥 #getyours #bluray @bladerunnermovie #bladerunner2049 #ryangosling #jaredleto #harrisonford #denisvilleneuve #anadearmas #mackenziedavis #davidbautista

A post shared by Sylvia Hoeks (@sylviahoeks) on Jan 17, 2018 at 1:24am PST

AFAN 25

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of AFAN Alessandro Fantini's relentless painting journey (to be celebrated in an upcoming multimedianic retrospective). 

AFAN 25 (a quarter-century with AFAN's paintings) 

Conceived and edited by AFAN. 

Music composed by AFAN (excerpts from "Antalgica" and "Gorgonia" albums).

Merry Christmas and an AFANtastic new year

Merry Christmas and an AFANtastic new year.

Eizan's flavours (Stefania Ferrario)

 

Alessandro Fantini - Eizan's flavours (Stefania Ferrario), 

pencil, ink and pastel on cardboard, 21x29cm. AFan 2017

Is this the Art world we really want?

When I saw the cover art of the new Roger Waters album "Is this the life we really want?" I was absolutely sure it was credited to or at least inspired by Emilio Isgrò, a famous conceptual artist who started developing his "cancelation" concept since the early '60, long before Syd Barrett founded Pink Floyd. Instead, it seems Waters was unaware of him or maybe his creative staff forgot to acknowledge him in the album credits. Isgrò has been able to report the plagiarism few days after the official release date and to stop the album distribution in Italy mainly thanks to the fact he's a world-wide renowned artist represented by several galleries around the globe.

However, I think my case is even worse: in 2008 the image of an oil painting I created and released on the web in 2006 for the 30th anniversary of Jean-Michel Jarre album "Oxygene" has been "stolen" by an illegal Russian label called "Star Mark" to be printed without my name as the cover art of an unoffficial greatest hits that's still on sale on many music stores. So far, I haven't been able to denounce them since the label hasn't an official address and no one suppported me in reporting this case of intellectual property right abuse. Jarre himself, who's the president of CISAC , the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, hasn't stated anything yet about this case directly linked to his music (last year I've even managed to personally give him my artbook containing that painting). 

  My artwork has been released for the first time on line in 2006 by the webmaster Duncan Walls on the JarreUk website as a tribute to the 30th anniversary of Jarre's "Oxygene" album and the "Water for life" concert held by Jarre in December amidst the dunes of the Sahara desert at Merzouga, Morocco .
Soon after in 2007 it has been featured as an animated video on my own Youtube channel:https://youtu.be/CfTyaIzyYXM
The original artwork has been exhibited for the first time at the London Brick Lane gallery during October 2007.
It has been included in my first color artbook "The Sinovial Gaze - The art of Alessandro Fantini" released in 2008.

Isgrò didn't need the support of CISAC as he's already wealthy and famous enough to sue anyone attempting to damage his intellectual property. His case can be considered the tragic proof that if you're a talented young artist (looking for being credited as such) but unable to pay lawyers or without influential friends you're doomed to be (metaphorically) raped and mocked by the commercial system. How can I encourage emerging artists to post their works on the web if someone like me, after releasing a sheer amount of artworks, books, videos and music is still struggling to be protected and treated with respect?
Is this the Art World we really want?

Gorgonia - Into and beyond the deep of pleasure

       

    

Gorgonia (2017)
Into and beyond the deep of pleasure. 

Available now on Spotify.

A concept album conceived and composed by Alessandro Fantini.

There's a troubled road leading to katastematic pleasure, a permanent state of spiritual well-being beyond the mercurial pleasures of physical world.

Composed, performed, mixed and produced by Alessandro Fantini.
AFANSOUND(2017)
©Copyright secured by Soundreef (2017)

AFAN's Easter egg

AFan's Easter egg (2003-2017) #archive #store #canvas #painting #oilpainting #fineart #oil #artwork #mutation #metamorphosis #Easter #egg #detail #landscape

A post shared by AFan Alessandro Fantini (@afanmultimedianic) on Apr 16, 2017 at 8:04am PDT