Federico Solmi Politics feel like a circus? Go see 'The Great Farce,' an art exhibit now at Northwestern

Chicago Tribune Nov 04, 2024

There’s no shortage of art this fall that’ll remind you of famous people running for the most powerful offices in the world. And then there’s Federico Solmi’s “The Great Farce,” which recently opened at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. It’s like all of the election year art, all at once, magnified, multiplied and crammed inside eight minutes of chaos. It’s vast yet crowded; meditative yet exhausting. It is a single sprawling work that chews up the Block’s largest room, but not entirely painting, and not really film. It’s categorized as a video installation, yet it’s mostly painting being shown on nine projectors simultaneously. Every image in it was painted initially, then scanned and reanimated in a video-game engine — allowing “The Great Farce” to live up to its title and cobble together centuries of leaders and atrocities, rubbing shoulders.

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