Bryant's ode

Alessandro Fantini - Bryant's ode (2013)

A poem in audiovisual verses and psychogenic visions dedicated to the city of New York as experienced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini's multimedianic brain.

Bryant's ode is my first attempt at translating into a living audiovisual mosaic of spoken feelings and unspoken moods my journey through the most iconic metropolis on earth, the "chess-board city" of New York, following the perpetual beat of street telling the secret heartbeat of mica-schist. Imbued by the spirit of the American poet William Cullen Bryant who promoted the creation of Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wrote my personal ode to the city by using a kaleidoscopic ink made of music, words, images and sounds gathered during my wanderings around the most recognizable as well as less famous spots of the city, transforming the eponymous park into my own writing desk, in order to recapture the echo of that "still voice" coming from "Earth and her waters".

Conceived, directed, edited and produced by Alessandro Fantini.
Poem, voice, cinematography and special effects by Alessandro Fantini.

AFAN Pictures 2013.

The numinous chains of American life

American life wizardry. 

On my way to Washington D.C. on 16th October I took some photos of Baltimore skyline from the bus window and I uploaded one of them to Instagram with the title “Never more, never more… Baltimore” as a citationistic tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, one of the main writers (Lovecraft and Le Fanu being the others) who inspired me to start writing tales during my childhood. The next morning I happened to visit the Capitol, right on the first day after the end of government shutdown, and while I was entering the rotunda, a photographer took some pics of my visitors group. The same day I spotted out by chance Alec Baldwin posing for a photo session behind the Smithsonian Castle just after I've been interviewed by a tv news crew along the National Mall. Eager to complete my American tour of Vermeer’s paintings started by visiting The Metropolitan Art Museum and the Frick Collection in New York, in the early morning of the 18th I reached out the National Gallery. While I was waiting for the museum to open, I glanced at the dozens of newspaper front pages displayed outside the Newseum on the opposite side of the road. On the The Sun of Baltimore an iconic photo of people entering the Capitol Rotunda illustrated the main article “Back to work and on to next deadline”. When I realized that the man in brownie jacket and hat portrayed in that photo was not my doppelganger, I instinctively asked to a person near me if there was a way to buy a copy of that newspaper in Washington. He enthusiastically answered that he was from Baltimore and that he could easily send me a copy. Yet this has been just one of the many numinous chains of coincidences I experienced during my USA adventure.

Bryant's ode

Alessandro Fantini Bryant's ode - A multimedianic poem to New York Trailer

 A poem in audiovisual verses and psychogenic visions dedicated to the city of New York as experienced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini's multimedianic brain. Conceived, directed and edited by AFAN Alessandro Fantini. Music and cinematography by AFAN Alessandro Fantini. AFAN pictures 2013

Grab the cab

Trailer Grab the cab - LearnItaly New York

 The trailer of the upcoming series dedicated to the story of Massimo Veccia and the fulfillment of his dream started and nurtured in New York City: LearnItaly, the Italian school and center for promotion of Italian culture in USA and Europe.

 Starring Massimo Veccia
Directed by Alessandro Fantini

www.learnitalygroup.com

The Breath of William Kurelek

post di William Kurelek's The Maze.

MULTIMEDIANIC

Multimedianic (2013) The audiovisual visiting card of the painter, draftsman, writer, filmmaker and composer Alessandro Fantini aka AFAN the Multimedianic Artist. Conceived and edited by Alessandro Fantini. Music by Alessandro Fantini

AFANstasis

Blind glowworms

NoMen trailer (2013)

Alessandro Fantini
NoMen
Trailer

Directed, written, performed, edited and produced by Alessandro Fantini
Music, cinematography, visual and sound effects by Alessandro Fantini

AFAN PICTURES 2013

If his own name were the only missing memory, the man waking up in a car tottering on the edge of a cliff, would know at least how he got there, why the doors are locked, and why the most obvious sign of human presence in that unearthly coastal scenery, is a colossal oil platform streatching like a metal spider above the sea horizon.
Neither the phone nor the radio will help him to save himself or rebuild the tormented history that led him on that precipice. Perhaps only in the claustrophobic vastness of a memory imprisoned in the dungeons of mind, it will be possible to find that name able to unseal the doors of a torn soul.

A pindarich flight, metaphorical and literal, which finds its raison d'être in making the present of an ecosystem, the Trabocchi coast in Abruzzo, threatened by the advance of oil exploitation, collide with a history of deadly fascination as that one celebrated in the pages of "Triumph of Death" by Gabriele D'Annunzio, "NoMen" is not just a short film: it's first and foremost a "multimedianic" tale written on the secret diary of a sailor at the mercy of the waves of time, without coordinates or landings. A time with no more names nor men able to remember the tragedies and romantic stories that have made the former ones, key words of a world still inhabited by passions shared without connections and wifi networks.

Alessandro Fantini's NoMen (2013) - Coming soon.

Nyctalopia

Nyctalopia (a news AFAN's concept album in progress)

TEASER (2013)

AFAN SHOW

SECRETA

SECRETA
Pictorial secrets and sound secretions
28-29-30 March 2013
The Castle Hostel, Atessa (Italy)

"No place is without a Genius", the ancients used to say. A statement well suited to spaces shaped by human ingenuity that have been able to stand up to the ravages of time by opposing the strength of a mysterious breath of life, a hidden force unknown to the same creators which infused it through the emotional brand of their lives. Just like microorganisms which, imprisoned for thousands of years in a state of hibernation within salt crystals, reproduce as they get back in contact with the external environment, so the memories, the vibes, the moral atmosphere of the time when the "genius loci", the soul of the place, proliferated into the rooms and in the interstices of the walls, awaken as soon as the aura of the first visitors of that architectural organism stimulates its invisible nerve endings.

The special event entitled "SECRETA" hosted in the tuff gallery of the ancient The Castle Hostel, a palace overlooking the homonymous square since 1565 in the medieval ward of Atessa in Abruzzo (Italy), is the new experimental solo show conceived by the “multimedianic” artist Alessandro Fantini. After the group shows of London, Rome and Los Angeles, he will be returning to exhibit in his native country, offering a blend of oil paintings based upon the theme of the emotive implications of the contemporary environmental dimension, with particular regard to the increasingly convulsive and restless nature of the local one.

From 28th to 30th of March, the "pictorial secrets and sound secretions", namely the paintings and electronic music composed by the artist himself, will try to evoke the "genius of the place", working as the aesthetic reagents in a collective experiment of "spiritual alchemy ", cocooned by the atemporal frame of the antique palace that has just reopened its halls to the public after a long period of restoration.

http://www.facebook.com/events/330335917089367/
THe AFAN Alessandro Fantini artist page: http://www.facebook.com/AfanTheMultimedianicArtist

A Californian interview

 The Californian artist Kobina Wright featured my art on her blog and she kindly interviewed me about several multimedianic topics, so I thoroughly urge you to not miss it. http://www.thewrighteronline.com/2013/03/alessandro-fantini-multimedianic.html

Here is an excerpt from the interview:

  "(...) when I think about Art, I instantly imagine a dark gigantic pool where each human being learns to develop his own breathing methods and swimming styles. I bet many art connoisseurs will be dismayed to find out that the Greek musician Vangelis is also a talented painter, that the Italian painter Andrea Savinio was also a composer and a writer, or that the Austrian drawer Alfred Kubin wrote a genial novel in 1908 anticipating the themes of movies such as “Dark city” and “Matrix”. These are just few examples to demonstrate that art is, first of all, a primeval urgency that can be declined in many different forms through the same individual sensibility and aptitude. 

Therefore I coined the neologism “multimedianic” to better define my versatile creative system by using the metaphorical image of the “medium”. During the séances the latter is the living channel through which the spirits are able to manifest themselves into the human dimension. Thus they can communicate by sounds or words spoken by the medium or formed on the “ouija” board, or even reveal themselves in material shapes like the so-called “ectoplasm” emitted by his body.

Obviously I don’t mean to give scientific credit to these paranormal phenomena: I just consider them an effective poetic way to describe my own artistic process, whose main precondition is the urge to translate, often simultaneously, an over human language through several human procedures able to preserve its selfless and outlandish quality into their wide range of expressive codes. That’s why, even when my writings, paintings, songs or movies are transpositions of my own mood and sensibility, at the same they’re the simultaneous aesthetic manifestations of a mysterious stream of visions and feelings residing in our “chromosomic memory” of mammals with large brain(...)"

AFANciful journey

  

AFANciful journey
The Art of Alessandro Fantini
Almost 20 years of of paintings by AFAN Alessandro Fantini

Conceived and edited by Alessandro Fantini
Music by Alessandro Fantini

http://www.facebook.com/AfanTheMultimedianicArtist?ref=hl
AFAN 2013

CALIFORNIAFAN

If “Music is the pure movement of thought” as Schopenhauer once wrote, then painting could be defined  the crystallization of emotions  nurtured by  the sound of that movement.  

Music has always worked as a physiologic solution allowing my artistic projects to achieve their poetic and spiritual lubrication, and let them swim in the maelstrom of perceptions. While I was painting this canvas the notes and words  of “Song to the siren”  written by Tim Buckley and performed by the watery and abyssal voice of Elizabeth Fraser, were constantly playing in my studio, flooding my physical and mental spaces as a tender whirling backwash. I think that diving into the abyss of soul towards the dark and passionate mysteries hidden within, as the text of the song seems to suggest, means somehow to reach the secret altitude of our most human feelings.

The “Painted Sound” group show is like a tracking shot of a greasy sound-scape, namely the ever mutating movie that music will always shoot inside our mind and will project into our heart.

AFAN Alessandro Fantini is 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 "It'll end in tears" by "This Mortal Coil", in the upcoming group show titled "Painted Sound" held at the Flower Pepper Gallery in Old Pasadena, California (USA) from January 26th to February 28th 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/

A Cyst of Gems

Alessandro Fantini - A cyst of gems from AFan Alessandro Fantini on Vimeo.

A Cyst of Gems

Music, vocals and lyrics by Alessandro Fantini.
Directed, conceived, animated, edited and produced by Alessandro Fantini.
" A Cyst of Gems" from the Alessandro Fantini's album "Coltan":
afanalessandrofantini.bandcamp.com/track/a-cyst-of-gems

A Cyst of Gems by AFAN Alessandro Fantini 2012 by AFAN Alessandro Fantini

TIRANTI TRANSIT O.S.T.

The official soundtrack of the Alessandro Fantini's mystical mistery movie "Tiranti Transit" available to watch on https://vimeo.com/6470502

"I think that's what makes cinema so powerful, a Wong Kar-Wai film wouldn't work in any other medium because it's not solely about the story, or solely about the aesthetics, it's about the fusion of music and visual to create a singular feeling. The score in this film is fantastic, moody and Blade Runneresque, it's a large part of why the short works as well as it does".
Patrick Meaney, director and movie reviewer

Released 08 January 2013
Composed, performed, recorded, mixed and produced by Alessandro Fantini (2005).

Alessandro Fantini - Je ne sais quoi

AFAN Alessandro Fantini - Je ne sais quoi from AFan Alessandro Fantini on Vimeo.

Beyond the Veil of Sais

Beyond the Veil of Sais (2008)

 (Vertical Triptych of Ego)
oil on canvas 60x80 cm.

Even though it was an enlightening revelation when I read it for the first time, I never really believed in the Sigmund Freud’s schematic model of human psyche divided in ID, Ego and Super Ego. Actually since my childhood I felt the presence of many more entities and forces inside myself, which weren’t so easily classifiable ‘cause over the years they continuously kept exchanging and merging between themselves. A useful method to project some of them out of my mind was a solitary role game with which I managed to let them speak and act through my voice and body. Two of the most recognizable figures among those molded by this peculiar ritual, were those of my sister and my twin brother, projections of the female and irrational shades of my own personality.
When I grew up and I quit playing that game the outlandish feeling of being surrounded by these “alter ego” never completely abandoned me: somehow giving them a fictional and iconographic life into my novels, movies, drawings and paintings has become the most effective surrogate to that role game. In the last few years the growing need to achieve a spiritual completeness through a real woman transformed them into the members of a mystical family living within my soul: consequently my twin brother became my son and my sister became my wife, thus recreating the Trinitarian structure of Freud’s theory as well as that one of religions such as Christianism, Hinduism, and particularly Egyptian consisting of the god Serapis, the goddess Isis and the child-god Horus.
The divine process of creativity allows to shape a symbolic shrine to contain and enhance the multitude of Ego haunting us for a lifetime.