Personal contact: danieleformica96@gmail.com
Artist Statement, Daniele Formica, 2026
Spanning across painting, text, sculpture and performance, Formica's body of work reflects on the essence of transitory life and the living being dealing with it. The work enacts a philosophy of life=art whilst confronting the fabulous contradictions of this position. The ideal self is defused departing from the struggle of the artist, and its extension trough body, personhood, property and relations. Formica is constantly moving and shows ever-changing possibilities of self-renewal: he describes this process as “contracted dance and expanded painting". Minimizing the dispositif of dance observation and enlarging the potential of what is a picture. The performance is not limited to actual dance, and rather escapes the constrictions of the defined act to twist itself on representation: it becomes alteration of space, manipulation of presence and absence, suggestion of person, semblance and resemblance. It is an open-relationship with transformation.
Techniques and materials mix the domestic environment in the artist studio: painting, dancing, tailoring and video-recording are combined with memorabilia, furniture, clothing, domestic appliances and ephemera.
Using the body, its memories, streams of consciousness and fantasies, the work results in vanishing visions, handwritten visual poems and recognizable objects from direct contemplations, emotions or longed for, unattained and impossible desires placed in a soft ecstatic clash against the orders of reality.
Engaging the world without a fixed structure or transcendental system of understanding, the works are incarnating ways to embrace the precarious confusion of the in-between.
Standing within and against language, they embody meanings escaping their own definitions.
The practice is constantly looking for possible new love within its orders, at the thresholds of words and names or things and images, and especially through the blur that escape those.
Through the practice each piece enters in a conversation as a diary-like constellation and fragmented mapping of the artist own vulnerable, in-between and disarticulating self.
