EmPathmos - the new AFAN's album

"Nowadays Empathy has become the most rare and endangered human ability. Just like John the Evangelist got the revelation he wrote down in the book of Apocalypse while exiled on the Patmos island, so I got the inspiration to compose an album about the "apocalyptic" skill of mutual feeling in the era of exile in the evergrowing island of online solitude. The supreme revelation will come when humans will feel each other again without talking, judging or reasoning. The supreme revelation will come when humans will FEEL again. Then the book of the Empath will start with the breeze of an eternal snap."

 

 

 EmPathmos 

Composed, performed, recorded, mixed and produced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini

 Lyrics, vocals and sound effects by AFAN Alessandro Fantini

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".

The breeze of an eternal snap

AFan Alessandro Fantini 

 The breeze of an eternal snap

 

Directed, edited and produced by AFAN Alessandro Fantini. 

Music, lyrics and vocals by AFAN Alessandro Fantini.

Stuck in Ogygia

AFAN Alessandro Fantini

Stuck in Ogygia, oil on canvas, 50x70 cm. (2019)

AFANRAMA playlist

 

 AFANRAMA

A collection of the best AFAN Alessandro Fantini's songs from his online discography (2011-2018).

1 Eleisong
2 Gartenmares (feat. Ariana aka Anna Vihonen)
3 Interlaude
4 Duende lux
5 Ignorancid
6 Glair Boat
7 Secrets of Gorgonia
8 Nyctalopia
9 Nothing but a fragment
10 A cyst of gem
11 Time Lash 

 

 

TRIEB 2019

AFAN Alessandro Fantini

TRIEB 2019  

oil on canvas, 40x40 cm. (2019)

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.