Fabio Ferrone Viola - Totti

Work signed by Francesco Totti.

This portrait of soccer player Francesco Totti was created by artist Fabio Ferrone Viola with an aesthetic that can certainly be defined as pop, given the use of famous or mass-produced images and their pictorial reworking. Pop Art emerged in the United States in the second half of the 20th century as a result of artists' interest in and critique of the contemporary "consumer society." All expressions of Pop Art presuppose a sort of double bond with the world of consumerism and mass media. On the one hand, the artwork is reduced to a mere consumer product, thanks to the use of advertising language in the works and their serial reproduction through mechanical processes. On the other hand, as in this case, the mass-produced images themselves become works of art, as a more genuine and truthful expression of the new society and thanks to the artist's recontextualization. Much of the artist Fabio Ferrone Viola's production starts from famous images of icons of our time, which are subjected to an artistic and pictorial recontextualization.

In this work, too, Fabio Ferrone Viola begins with a famous figure, significant to our time, in an equally famous image, circulated by the press and enjoying great mass media impact. What is being proposed, in short, is a true icon of our times, and consequently, its representation must also have iconic characteristics. This means going beyond sensory and contingent data to create a meaningful image. For this reason, Totti's figure is simplified using a process reminiscent of the world of graphic design, or rather advertising, so that the portrait is characterized by a captivating language and a guaranteed aesthetic impact, with a precise reference to contemporary mass media languages. Thus, formally, the figure is created practically in negative, with the black color constructing it from the intense red of the space and the uniform. Fabio Ferrone Viola's operation takes on even greater meaning since it is accomplished in a specifically pictorial manner. That is, the artist focuses on the expressive qualities of color, deliberately dirtying the image, with an aesthetic that recalls the pop reworkings of Mario Schifano and, consequently, a gesture typical of American Abstract Expressionism.

Fabio Ferrone Viola was born in Rome in 1966. The son of a well-known collector, he followed his father on numerous trips to the United States, where he fell in love with pop culture and New Dada. He found inspiration in masters like Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg, whose references are found in his work. He uses a wide range of techniques, from painting to collage. Coca-Cola cans are a special source of inspiration: in his works, the cans become the basis for flags and portraits of American icons like JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Ferrone Viola has held numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad (London, New York, Miami), and in July 2016, he exhibited his work at the Complesso del Vittoriano.

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