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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 new possibilities within its orders, at the thresholds of words and names or things and images, and especially through the blur that escape those.
Each step is a re-negotiation to define the essence of the contemporary artist: the ambitious and fragile question of making terms with collective human condition departing from personal experience.
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 character.
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.