MAGMA gallery is glad to present Someone is watching you, a double-show with Franco Fasoli and Hell’O Collective, from June 6 to July 11, 2020. Two international names whose work is united by bright colors and compositions that refer to a surreal universe, declined in two different ways. The Belgian duo Hell’O Collective, through rigorous execution, represents a world of bizarre and mysterious figures similar to a dreamlike vision or a symbolic puzzle. Franco Fasoli works instead, more figuratively, on the theme of identity and on the relationship between global culture and subcultures, representing with a touch of irony scenes of everyday life, private spaces, or staging conflicts and clashes between allegorical figures half man and half beast which visually seem to be part of a surreal world, but semantically refer to a well-defined social and identity reality.
Franco Fasoli (also known as Jaz - Buenos Aires, 1981) is one of the best known and most talented artists on the Argentine scene.
Set designer and muralist, Fasoli began to imagine the streets as a canvas in the late 90s. Already in these first experiences we note the influence of the study and passion for ceramics and, at the same time, of the strong link with the "fileteado" technique, typical of the Argentine capital. Shortly thereafter his style evolved, moving away from more traditional writing, introducing into his work the representation of the true contradictions of Latin American societies, their rituals and their apparently perennial instability. One of the most surprising aspects of his work is his exploration of materials and dimensions.
The tension between the dominant global culture and subcultures as spaces of resistance has influenced him both conceptually and in his actions throughout his career. Multiple forms of individual and collective identity constitute the sociological backbone of his work. Conflict, confrontation, destructuring of the portrayed scene are some of the elements used by Fasoli to stimulate the vision and perception of the public. The concept of identity is in fact one of the founding cornerstones of his work, both in the murals and in the paintings on canvas or in the sculptures. His research explores how individual and collective identities are formed and the ever-changing relationship between them.
In 2016 he participated in important group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, at the Emilio Caraffa Museum in Córdoba (Argentina) and at the important Artmossphere Biennale in Moscow. In 2011 he exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Rosario in Argentina and in 2010 at the Museo Mube in Sao Paulo.
The world described by Hell’O (Jerôme Meynen, 1982, and Antoine Detaille, 1980) is surreal and colorful, characterized by a rigorous execution, populated by bizarre figures and mysterious symbols. A world that is sometimes grotesque but always poetic, in which philosophical and non-sense questions alternate and find themselves, leaving the public the freedom to follow and explore the preferred route. A joyful and macabre carnival, silent and rowdy at the same time, from which their great compositional and chromatic control emerges. Important, among other exhibitions, not only splendid personal at the 2018 BAM of Mons dedicated to their first 10 years of career, but also the exhibitions at the Musée d'Ixelles and the Palais des Beaux-Arts Bozar, both in Brussels.
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