Federico Solmi: Adrift

Excerpt from an article written by Charles Moore and published by The Brooklyn Rail

Federico Solmi (b. 1973) has long veered away from subtlety. His current exhibition, Adrift, announces itself the moment you walk in. Solmi’s epic painting, The Ship of Fools (2024) occupies an entire gallery wall. It boasts 122 by 237 inches of deep blue ground covered in dense white lines, each figure rendered in a style that reads like three-dimensional wireframe geometry. It is a painting built to overwhelm, and it does, not only in terms of its scale, but through the saturation and foreboding sense that power exists primarily as image.

Solmi’s inspiration is Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19). Géricault documented the wreck of the French frigate, Medusa, off the coast of Senegal in 1816, during a colonial mission associated with the slave trade. The ship’s captain, appointed more through political connection than competence, loaded high-ranking officials into the lifeboats and left some 150 others to build a makeshift raft. After days of murder and cannibalism at sea only ten survived. When the painting premiered at the Paris Salon, it shocked audiences with its graphic nature and its implied indictment of a ruling class willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable.

Federico Solmi
The Ship of Fools, 2024
Soft pastels, white pen and ink, and gouache on canvas, 122 x 237 inches
Courtesy of the artist