OFLUXO

Monica De Cardenas is delighted to announce Vento Forte, the first exhibition by young Italian artist Federico Tosi in Switzerland. The project stages, through a series of about forty terracotta sculptures, the consequences of a shocking event of unspecified nature. We perceive it as a strong wind that overwhelms everything in its path: we see it ripple the blades of grass and run into the trees until they bend. In a progression that is gentle at first, then dizzying, it shakes the daily life of citizens, their animals and the objects that surround them. It gains strength until it runs over cars, cranes and trucks. A second later an entire city is hit: buildings and skyscrapers crumble… while pizzas from restaurants fly away.

The wind turns into a nightmare and the viewer wonders what triggered this disaster. With an apparently simple and direct visual language, Tosi creates an apocalyptic and at times comical vision of an event that disrupts the routine of the distracted inhabitants of the 21st century – illusorily carefree, while future catastrophes loom over their heads. In a last sculpture the artist shows us the progressive disintegration of a cat’s body: first the fur, then the skin, and finally the muscles are swept away by the violent wind.

Federico Tosi was born in Milan in 1988 and graduated from Brera Academy of Fine Arts in 2014. His provocative and enigmatic works, often made with unusual materials, have already caused a stir on several occasions: the carved bovine bones on display at Almanac in Turin in 2017; the two cancer cells tenderly holding hands made in resin in 2014; the carcasses of downed birds in multi-colored resin (Rotten Bullshit, 2014-16); the jaws of a shark in marble (Make New Friends #3, 2012) and the bronze sculpture of a cat with spiky hair (Untitled Cat, 2018).

In 2018, Tosi presented his first solo show titled Goodbye bye bye at Monica De Cardenas gallery in Milan, imagining a journey backwards in the space-time of the universe: large drawings of galaxies made with felt-tip pens, sculptures of fossils in concrete with plausible but non-existent shapes, and the tiny figurine of an underwater swimmer, who, observing a seashell, reflects on the fractal formation of matter.

Tosi’s research probes into complex and dramatic aspects of our existence, ravenously looks into obscure crannies, creating fantastic and disturbing scenarios, not without a note of irony.