AFAN FLIES TO PASADENA

AFAN Alessandro Fantini will be featured with his new oil painting "Je ne sais quoi" dedicated to "Song to the siren" composed by Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett in 1968 and sung by Elizabeth Fraser 15 years later on the album "This Mortal Coil", in the upcoming group show titled "Painted Sound" to be held at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Old Pasadena, California (USA) from January to February 2013.

Keep an eye on this blog and on the group show's website where more news and insights about the event will be revealed in the next weeks:http://paintedsoundshow.jimdo.com/artists/

Tianxia - Life of Under Heaven

Tianxia - Life of Under Heaven (2012)

 Oil on canvas 50x70cm.

A statement about the self-destructive vitality of human life.

AFAN on Fine Art America

Tantalite (2012)

Theorematic love (2012)

Enjoy one of my latest oil painting with the Zoom.it service.
More to come in the next days.

ICONOSPHERE WEB SERIAL

A multimedianic blend of theatre, fiction, videoart and literature. Recluse in a remote hut on the edge of time, an unknown cenobite tries to decipher the echoes of humankind memory, torn between true stories and fictitious images, looking for the debris of his own soul.

 When dates and units of measurement cease to have any meaning; when between memories and hallucinations new bonds of blood arise; when the simulacra eat pieces of truth torn from the images; when the perception of the ego is just a sob of boredom among the swarm of collective time; when the intuitions of the future fall into the silence of a prophecy in a vegetative state; when the transcription of the newspaper is indistiguibile from an accident report; when the soliloquy is one of the many disguises of the interior anarchy; all that still claims to be (by being recalled) fluctuates in the iridescence of the Iconosphere. 

Directed, written, produced, performed and produced by Alessandro Fantini. Cinematography, music and special effects by Alessandro Fantini.

ICONOSPHERE - THIRD ACT

ICONOSFERA SUITE - Third movement by AFAN Alessandro Fantini 2012

A Cyst of Gems by AFAN Alessandro Fantini (2012)

A Cyst of Gems by AFAN Alessandro Fantini (2012)

A Cyst of Gems (2012)
Lyrics and vocals by AFan Alessandro Fantini
Music composed, performed and produced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini
Art cover by AFAN Alessandro Fantini
From the concept album "Coltan" http://afanalessandrofantini.bandcamp.com/album/coltan

AFAN VAN SANGRE

Green Blood opening day

Green Blood opening - The polymorphic heartbeat of Nature

AFAN FEATURED IN GROUP SHOW - GREEN BLOOD - AT DOROTHY CIRCUS GALLERY

"The Permafrost Dithyrambos ", oil on canvas, 50x40cm. (2011)
This revisitation of the painting "The Permafrost sonnet"
by AFAN Alessandro Fantini will be featured in Charity Show GREEN BLOOD curated by Alexandra Mazzanti & Tara McPherson
opening on June 14th 2012 at Dorothy Circus Gallery, Rome http://dorothycircusgallery.com/

The upcoming group show at Dorothy Circus Gallery entitled Green Blood, curated by Alexandra Mazzanti and Tara McPherson, opens on June 14th and can be seen through July 20th. This exhibition will be an efflux of surrealistic paintings with a focus on the symbolism of life and nature. Green Blood features a wide variety of talented artists such as Tara McPherson, Jeff Soto, Martin Wittfooth, Travis Louie, Lola, Brandi Milne, Leila Ataya, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Roland Tamayo, Ana Bagayan, Scott Musgrove, Yosuke Ueno, Sergio Mora, Dave Cooper, Paolo Guido, AFan Alessandro Fantini, Alessia Iannetti, Anastasia Kurakina, Gary Baseman, Kathie Olivas, Brandt Peters, Chris Ryniak, Ixie Darkonn, Amanda Spayd, Mr. Klevra and Corine Perier. These artists are exploring mystical doctrines, creation, and how nature continues to be a centralized symbol of life. All artworks and drawings are created for charity and sales will be donated to Greenpeace and Oceana; charities that take care of animals and nature.
Hi*Fructose article: http://hifructose.com/2012/05/24/green-blood-group-show-at-dorothy-circus-gal..." class="external">[link]
"The green blood of nature differs from ours only for an atom, magnesium instead of iron.
Twins of the trees and dependent upon each other. One ancestral link led to the development of the core mystical doctrines concerning the secret aspect of creation.
The tree has always been used as a symbol of life. In the Kabbalah is the program according to which there was the creation of the world, and the path of descent along which the souls and creatures have reached their present form. It is also the path slope, through which the entire creation can return to the goal which we all long: the unity of the "womb of the Creator." "Tree of Life" is the "Jacob's Ladder" (see Genesis 28), whose base is resting on the ground and its top touches the sky. By trees, reminiscent of the ancient blood pact, by the green blood creatures, the artists of the Green Blood are inspired, involving the nature in its entirety and representing its entities through a surrealistic painting."

AFAN's blood turns green at Dorothy circus Gallery

AFan Alessandro Fantini "I ditirambi del Permafrost - The Permafrost Dithyrambos", detail - oil on canvas, 2011

Poster design by Valentina Antelmi

The upcoming group show at Dorothy Circus Gallery entitled Green Blood, curated by Alexandra Mazzanti and Tara McPherson, opens on June 14th and can be seen through July 20th. This exhibition will be an efflux of surrealistic paintings with a focus on the symbolism of life and nature. Green Blood features a wide variety of talented artists such as Tara McPherson, Jeff Soto, Martin Wittfooth, Travis Louie, Lola, Brandi Milne, Leila Ataya, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Roland Tamayo, Ana Bagayan, Scott Musgrove, Yosuke Ueno, Sergio Mora, Dave Cooper, Paolo Guido, AFan Alessandro Fantini, Alessia Iannetti, Anastasia Kurakina, Gary Baseman, Kathie Olivas, Brandt Peters, Chris Ryniak, Ixie Darkonn, Amanda Spayd, Mr. Klevra and Corine Perier. These artists are exploring mystical doctrines, creation, and how nature continues to be a centralized symbol of life. All artworks and drawings are created for charity and sales will be donated to Greenpeace and Oceana; charities that take care of animals and nature.

Hi*Fructose article: [link]

AFAN's painting featured in group show "Green Blood" at Dorothy Circus Gallery

"The Permafrost dithyrambos" (2011) by AFAN Alessandro Fantini featured in Charity Show GREEN BLOOD curated by Alexandra Mazzanti & Tara McPherson opening on June 14th 2012 at Dorothy Circus Gallery, Rome http://www.dorothycircusgallery.com/

AFAN VAN SANGRE - Teaser

From the tip of the tongue to the tip of the brush

From the tip of the tongue to the tip of the brush
(Foreword of "Presque vu - Atlas of Untold")

Presque vu (Deluxe edition) by Alessandro Fantini | Make Your Own Book

As the majority of people I’ve often experienced that peculiar phenomena called “Déjà vu”, that is when a situation, place or a scene actually happening or manifesting itself for the first time seems to be the perfect as well as ominous replica of something we’ve already seen or lived before. As far as I can remember that perception was very recurrent over my childhood. Sometime its intensity was so enveloping and insidious that more than once I was about to believe that this feeling was the proof I lived one or many more previous existences. In my case it happened mostly when I was alone in the open countryside, just surrounded by the vibrant silence of the twilight, or when I was inside an old building like that one of my grandparents . I still vividly remember how I was entranced by studying the penumbra descending over the dizzy staircase leading to the bedroom like a bridge built among two distant temporal dimensions. My fear of falling while climbing it was so strictly tied to my enthrallment for its majestic and ancient weirdness, that the sense of having already been there centuries ago (and not just physically) became a sort of sadomasochistic rapture. The occurrence of such ideas easily melted with my dreamlike activities, enhancing my sense of dislocation and creepy longing since I couldn’t establish the right amount of fantasy (or dreamed memories) generating my particular “déjà vu” experiences. Soon this mood evolved in a deeper state of mind that engulfed my imagination pushing me to find a way to free myself from the overgrowing sense of eeriness by giving them a plastic interpretation.

Since I was 4 years old, drawing was the most direct process of draining my kaleidoscopic entanglement of uncanny emotions. When I learned writing I had the chance to try decrypting that aura of mystery through the evocative use of words. Nevertheless, I slowly realized that both narrative and poetic writing were limited by a rational cage of rules and structures unable to fully preserve the same quality of magical enigma owned by other less exclusive codes like music or cinema. Even radical experiments like those of James Joyce who tried to replicate the “stream of consciousness” erasing the punctuation and syntax, or Guillame Apollinaire who conceived the “calligrammes” in order to graphically enhance the lyrical power of words, looked like too much ingenious attempts to imitate the same spontaneous poignancy of the visual or musical arts. Consequently the will of approaching the art of painting marked a third step in my personal quest to translate what Freud called “unheimliche”. Indeed it was around my early adolescence, when I was managing to acquaint myself with the canvas and the brushes, that I started to analyze a more subtle shade in my own sentiment. Actually the illusory perception of forethought contained inside the psychic delight of the “déjà vu” revealed to be the source of a more complex tension linked to the bewitching nature of a cosmic truth hidden behind simple circumstances or images. While I was keeping working on my feverish painting expeditions , I progressively began to seek this new intuition into cinema and video art, whose grammar of lively mysteries seem to be closer to the perfect rendition of that delicate and powerful emotion of an impending revelation evolving in space and time. Although so far I dedicated myself to writing, directing movies and music videos and composing music, I still consider painting my most intimate dominion where pursuing the evocation of what I like to define “mysterium interruptum”, “a suspended mystery”, that is something very similar to the experience of the “presque vu”, “almost seen”, when we feel that we’re about to recall a name or a word without being able to tell it. In fact like the more sensual “coitus interrupts”, the pleasure of this impression relies on the anguished awareness of the unspeakable that only the crystallization of momentum rendered by a painting can deliver to the watcher, whereas art forms like cinema and music manifesting themselves in time tend to dissolve this “frozen arousal” into their dynamic volatility. Thus I can say that my best paintings, most of them collected in this book, are somehow the aural secretion of the loop between the “déjà vu” and the “presque vu”.

 One of the most meaningful release of this “circuit” has been the painting entitled “The breath of William Kurelek”. The story of my obsession for the painter Kurelek dated to the discovery of his masterwork "The Maze" that happened accidentally when I was a child reading a large book about psychiatry belonging to a friend of my father. The detailed and disturbing sagittal representation of a human skull full of boxes containing small iconic scenes (reminiscent of those ones depicted by Magritte, Ernst and Dali) impressed me so deeply that I couldn't forget it for a long while, even if I wasn't able to know who was the painter since the book didn't provide the name of the author. The mystery enveloping both the painting theme and its creator boosted even more my fascination for the image. Somehow his Bosh-like and bruegelesque taste reminded me an intense state of mind I perceived when I was very young staring at the little figures on the basement of an old globe in my house. But when I checked that basement I discovered that those figures never existed. Accidentally many years later I found again the same large book in the house of a friend of mine, and this time I was tormented by the gloomy urgency of a truth hidden behind that image. I checked out the illustration references at the end of the volume and, following the several clues on the web, I finally managed to find his name. Since then I studied his life reading rare Canadian books and discovered further impressive pictures and drawings he made during the period he spent at the London Maudsley Hospital when he was hospitalized for his depression and painted "The Maze". I started to paint a medieval urban landscape while I was simply musing about all the ancient feelings I recovered when I found again that gruesome Kurelek's self-portrait. Even though I cannot explain why I paint it, I think that showing what you cannot express through words and logic, or that is "on-tip-of-the tongue", might be the reason paintings are made for.  

Alessandro Fantini, November 2011

EDOnism at the Good Rapport Film Festival in Tokyo, 7th & 8th April 2012

Sci fi thriller EDONISM directed by Alessandro Fantini and produced by Lorenzo Fantini and WALKING LOST by LAFAN Productions will screen at the Good Rapport Film Festival in Tokyo.
Screening times: 4:30pm Saturday, 7 April and 9:30am Sunday, 8 April.

For access map/ticketing information visit the festival website: http://goodrapport.rionne.com/schedule.html

James came to Tokyo looking for the dream and a life with his beautiful wife, Sophie. Instead he found a life of toil, torment and alcoholism. Unable to face his descent into self destruction, Sophie left, abandoning him to his downward spiral into the gutter.
 When things can't get any worse, his grip on reality is stolen from under him as he experiences all manner of hallucinations and ulitmately a coma.
 When he is revived he begins to learn some terrifying truths about his condition and his connection to a long forgotten legend from ancient Japan.
 Together with the resourceful Dr Geena Landlord he attempts a desperate quest of discovery that leads them both to the very heart of conspiracy involving a secret government order and the enigmatic being known as the The Cat Fish .

Official website: www.edonism-movie.com/

Giant show at TIMES SQUARE?

Art Takes Times Square

Presented by Chashama, Produced by Artists Wanted.
"We will be taking over a slew of the most iconic video billboards in Times Square to create the largest exhibition of art in New York City".

I've always dreamt about displaying my visions on vidwalls or on the skyscrapers and buildings facades since most of their subject refers to the swarming life of polymorphic metropolis nurtured and moulded by the irrational feedabcks of their inhabitants, like a mucilagenous brain pulsating inside an ever-changing hive made of cells full of fears and desires.

My portfolio needs to be collected 7 times in order to be viewable in the public judging, so spread the word and support my submission by clicking "collect" [link]

 http://afantini.artistswanted.org/atts2012

Gestation in progress

Iconosfera - Atto secondo (English sub available)

Time Lash (2012)

Time lash (2012)

Iconosphere - First act (English subtitles)