Francesco Simeti is an artist based in New York. This conversation was recorded during the Artissima art Fair in Turin, Italy, on Nov. 9th, 2012.
Francesco Simeti was born in Palermo by a Sicilian father and an American mother. Since 1996 he has been living in New York. He is mainly working on public art, recently he did a permanent piece for the PSI 861 primary school in Staten Island and a piece for a subway station in Brooklyn. At the moment he is working on a permanent piece for the home of MCC theater in Manhattan in collaboration with the Andrew Berman Architect firm.
For several years now he has been working on the idea of accumulation of images, whether found or his own photographs; he keeps adding them to create a sort of natural landscape. The subway piece in particular, titled “Bensonhurst Gardens” is born out of the specificity of the Bensonhurst neighborhood which sees the presence of different ethnic groups: Chinese, Italian and Jewish. He has been collecting images that belong to each one of these groups, mainly iconographic images and plant images that are all overlapping each other.
The gardens he ends up making are very surreal, plans come out of a landscape that is deteriorated, at times even toxic, with mounts of garbage and waste. Beautiful plants and gardens are coming out of these pictures. This is a sort of representation of hope that nature will manage to come back. There is definitely an environmental overtone to it.
Regarding upcoming projects, he has just opened a solo show at Galleria d’arte Moderna in Palermo and he also mentions the project with the textile company Miroglio in Alba (Italy) where he has just finished a workshop with Loris Cecchini. The results of this workshop will be presented in March 2013 at Continua Gallery in Beijing.