Artist: Flavio Favelli
Exhibition title: China
Venue: Francesca Minini at LISTE 2015, Basel, Switzerland
Date: June 15 – 21, 2015
Photography: images courtesy of the artist and Francesca Minini
Flavio Favelli (Florence, 1967) creates installations by using old forniture items or everyday objects that refer to the bourgeois aesthetic of the familiar environment where he grew up and to the Eastern culture he studied at the University. His works are collages, sculptures and site specific installations in which these second-hand materials, belonging to these two different worlds, are assembled giving life to combinations of meanings, isolating the object from its mere being and elevating it to a symbol of the past everyday life, that subconsciously meets the present. Meditating on memory and on the development of a sort of “poetics of the object” focused on the dichotomy between exotic and the everyday, Favelli ties together his own life and collective history and politics.
The site-specific China installation for LISTE is a peculiar environment where eastern and western elements are combined together in a big visual collage, where different ideas and visions of environments are interlaced and overlapped creating a new atemporal space. The title is related to China: China in english means porcelain, but also China, the country. Most of the works are characterized by Chinese style objects made in ceramic and porcelain. A leitmotiv which links all the works together is the flower motif painted on the red floor-platform and the walls related to the famous italian vases Fabbri Extra. The Fabbri Company, founded in 1905 in Italy, is nowadays still very famous for its production of spirit black cherry and its vases became a symbol in the Thirties because of their exotic appeal and they were present in every houses. With the beginning of the adverstising they start then to export their products all around the world bringing with their logo the idea of an italian product with an international appeal.
The selected pieces swing between shapes of traditional objects, typical of the interiors of the italian bourgeois houses, and the new advertising images that have invaded the society. Flavio Favelli’s works have been shown in the most important international institutions: MAXXI, Rome; Museo del Novecento, Milan; MACRO, Rome; American Academy in Rome; Tate Modern, London; MCA, Chicago; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Palazzo Grassi, Venice; Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; Benaki Museum, Athen; MAMBO, Bologna; Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes; Creative Art Center, Beijing; Musèe d’Art Moderne de Saint- Etienne, Saint- Etienne ; Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Los Angeles; Museion – Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bolzano. In 2003 and in 2013 the artist took part to the Venice Biennale and in 2012 he represented Italy in the 11° Biennale de La Habana.
