Go Ghost!
Through the use of DIY aesthetics and an often off-the-cuff approach full of humor and self-irony, Finizio has been developing a body of work rooted in the observation of incidents and phenomena that revolve around questions of exchange, value and cultural meaning. His installations operate as both events and models. They entangle the depiction of scripted spaces of commerce, habitat, display, construction, archive and work, with a model-like quality that actively speculates on the uses, statuses, and sentiments that these spaces perform.
As an introduction to his solo exhibition at Frac Bretagne, the artist has decided to speak. Poetic in form, close to slam in its sounds, his text below is intended to both take a position and begin a narrative.
An animal tossed into an empty space, a field or cage
Will quickly make for the corner.
A space, empty to start.
Cold and dark.
A switch discretely niched
To play master of night and day.
On-off. Cool white. Big blank.
w O mb
r OO m
t O mb
All share the same vowel
An O-pening of sorts
Though pronounced the same
only once does that “O” O-ccur twice.
Implying perhaps a tO and frO That you may cOme and gO As you please
A good room has its ins and outs
“Every day I push the broom across the room to make some room for the next day.”
A space is more than its interplay of walls windows and doors.
A space becomes what it is according to what you put inside it, how you arrange those things and their respective qualities.
As Martin Kippenberger beautifully demonstrated with “The happy end of Kafka’s America”
As is visible in my work “How I went In and out of Business for seven Days and Seven Nights”
I’m interested in spaces that take shape from within rather than above.
Space exploration starts at your fingertips.
I’m interested in space as plural and mobile. It happens. Is and was.
I’m looking for the point or moment where one thing becomes several.
Contours become blurred, logic fuzzy
Oscillate IS the steady state. Shapes shift.
Identity takes a hit…
(Put a dent in your “I” !)
The linguistic tyranny of commodities teaches us that a table is a table is maybe a dinner table but is certainly not a desk or workbench.
A table is also a bed, a shelter, a boat, a shield, a table-au
This was the idea behind the title of my exhibition ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICLUBPUB at MOBY, Bat Yam, Israel
Where the vessel that is the museum building became all those spaces at once.
Names must be tossed aside to feel things fresh
Language needs thickening : put the putty back in poettry (sic).
How sad for a chair to be reduced to a set of logocentric representations.
When we could think things affects such as “sit ass silent softly”
“Jam Econo” as the Minutemen put it.
Make with Hammers for Hands. An art of heart and parts.
Oppose the all-thumbs to the opposable thumb.
Dumb down enjoy the low life and help things help themselves.
Lo-fi semper fi : sea shells can do cell phones.
Low-res rapid proto leaves the imagination free to ponder both the best and the worst.
Finishing is farther than I need to go.
Walk shoestring budgets.
Arrange, rearrange disrupt and derange.
GO GHOST !!!
Ghosts don’t make things. They move things.
They rattle windows and walls, sling furniture and hurl objects, shake the house and all inside…
They trigger encounters and collisions, squat bodies like thieves do cars for joyrides…take possession of them so to speak – ventriloquy.
My economy is the stand-up comic’s.
A glass of water and a microphone, maybe a stool for when the glass gets tired.
The stand-up comic’s condition is not unlike that of the early Christian hermit: each works his schtick spartan and lonely.
Bunuel tapped into this with Simon of the Desert
Overhead is minimal and storage isn’t an issue.
A stand up economy.
I remember a teacher back in art school scolding us for our one-liners,
As if each time we’d committed a shamefully stupid crime.
But if your one liners are good and you can line a few up, you start to have material.
And maybe in those few lines you can say more than your average American author in a six hundred page book.
THE ARTIST
Francesco Finizio (1967, United States), lives and works in Plouzané.
“Finizio’s work is dictated by the overwhelming material saturation surrounding us. With simple yet sophisticated tools, he utilizes the resources available to him. By employing concrete and everyday means, Finizio’s ongoing research into the languages and gestures of consumerism and mass communications, produce new and poignant articulations of our economic, cultural, social, political and artistic condition.” Joshua Simon, neomaterialism.tumblr.com, upload on 2015 February 20, [read online on 2021 January 29]. Available on https://neomaterialism.tumblr.com/
Francesco Finizio is graduated of a Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College in New York in 1992. In 1997, he completed his formation with a post-diploma at École supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Marseille. From 2000 to 2005, he taught sculpture and video at University Aix-Marseille. He is now teaching at Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Brest. His work has been presented at MOBY, Museums of Bat Yam in Tel Aviv – Israel (2015), at CAN in Neuchâtel – Switzerland (2016) or more recently at RDV Gallery in Nantes (2019).
Image : © Francesco Finizio. Photo credit : Aurélien Mole