Personal contact: danieleformica96@gmail.com
Artist Statement, Daniele Formica, 2026
My artistic practice develops through painting, writing, sculpture, performance and video performance. Often ideas and attitude take the center, dictating what to do and how to bring forward the process. This nonchalant character in adopting ever new styles and techniques has been described as pantagruelic eclecticism, and I really find myself in this description. At the center of the practice is precisely an auto-performative activity where I honestly try to enact doubts and reflections with any artistic medium at my direct disposal, relating with my weight and body to its creative possibilities. All is in continuous movement: identity, sexuality, moral, reason and even the spiritual dimension. In the practice, at the best I can, I try to map each fragment of this great transformation, to give back my wide and frenzy vision of the times we live in.
Language and performance are at the center of the practice, even when I develop paintings or sculptures.
My relation to language develops through recognizing repetitions and variations in associations and interpretations. This happens both when I work through seriality, allowing me to study similarity and difference; as well as specifically through the direct use of text, producing writings that are half way between prose and poetry, widening and distressing the meaning of words.
The performative aspect of my practice is given by the fact that everything departs and returns to the artist, as a corporeal breathing, a dance. And precisely in the last years I have gotten conceptually closer to dance, to imagine an abstract movement, a body that jumps and rests from technique to technique as a bee that pollinates flower after flower.
In this dance everything is involved an the surrounding acquires new creating power. From this power come the ready-mades and the wide use of personal experiences and emotions transformed to reflect on their collective human dimension. The performance is not limited to the performative act, but expands itself to escape and resist any definition, that is by it defused. And it is precisely this resistance to the end that characterizes the struggle of the artist and my political commitment in realizing and transmitting the creative power to defuse univocal visions of the world and the
times we live in.
DANCE/
DF approaches dance via video recording himself in his studio in The Hague, NL, during the pandemic of 2020-2022.
Video-recording emerges in response to the unexpected and sudden absence of audience (Video-performing and video-dancing are found to behold an epistolary diachronic principle with their audience, the camera becoming a stand-in puppet-mediator).
Studio-recording has been especially inspired by the auto-recording practice seen in the exhibition Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies, at Punta della Dogana in Venice, in 2021.
There is something in dancing, DF slowly realizes, that recalls the transition of the flux of language between speech and writing.
While taking the first steps to respond this call, DF moves within the spaces of loneliness, the frame and screen(a camera, une chambre) and its projections in the staging of present>past>future. This additional layers add to DF interest in the person, memory, permanence, impermanence and transformation.
SPEAK/
In 2019 DF starts developing speech based performances, where different unwritten texts are orally transmitted to the audience within installations of objects (and sometimes drawings or artworks) that serve as a memory device to repeat the speeches and the actions or gestures they involve.
Each text functions as a different dissertation of DF's own reflections, lingering between conveying a provoking point of view and articulating the persona behind it, leaving the ambiguity unsolved as to experience the presence of a truth alongside the emergence of a personhood.
Throughout the pandemic of 2020-2022, the speech performances gradually transited into recorded videos (secondary orality), culminating in the lengthy project Derive Romane(2022), where DF uses the city of Rome (especially the bankside of river Tiber, Imperial Forum, EUR district and his family house) to develop a real time spoken derive/delirium recursively transforming and staging his presence to play with the fabric of reality, mediated and directed through the camera frame that constantly follows.
WRITE/
Writing is a practice that alongside drawing has accompanied DF since the very beginning. Language plays a key role in the practice, and writing is strictly connected to expanding, experiencing and further understanding notions of language. Notions are never fixed in DF view. All is constantly moving, alive, influencing and infecting the very understanding and interpreting of life. A cosmos escaping its cosmology. Language itself is up for discussion. Within this process, the "graphic act" is constantly reflected upon as the event of embodiment, incarnation and transformation through interaction with external bodies, with aliens. Writing holds this promise to the alien, the foreigner, the stranger: I will hold from you and I will give to you. The will of writing (and thus to archive and re-enact) is an exercise that the artist acquires through experience. Handwriting, painting letters and words, typing, recording, memorizing a series of words (as a spell), or the thought patterns that can be conveyed with a handful of different sentences and combinations, patterns of movement, arrangement of objects and images in specific codes and associations... these are examples of practices that DF has eclectically experienced, inflated and twisted under the notion of writing.
