Flavio Favelli: Le macchine

From 12th to 16th April, on the occasion of miart and Milano Art Week 2023, in the LoroMilano space (via Ugo Bassi 32), Flavio Favelli presents Le macchine, a special project realised in collaboration with Francesca Minini and with the support of Fondazione Pietro e Alberto Rossini.

Three large sculptural works that have as their subject the automobile, idol and simulacrum of our time, will occupy the 1000 square metres of the exhibition space for five days.

The artist has worked on three different car models (a Jaguar, a BMW and a Fiat 500) using enamel paint and sheet metal inserts. Stripped of their attributes to the point of rawness, “invested” and clad with images, the three cars are transformed into distorted and disturbing objects, into aggregations of signs and visions.

Gran Gala is a painted body of a 1996 Jaguar XJ6 x300, which belonged to a famous Italian singer, whose chassis, stark naked, without a single gram of other materials, is painted with a razzle-dazzle motif, in use in the First World War. The razzle-dazzle was a system of camouflage characterised by intersecting lines and geometric figures, used to confuse the observer and make it difficult for him to perceive the distance, speed and size of a moving object, such as a military ship.

Serravalle is a fully painted 1983 BMW 316. The painting is the final act of a process that lasted several months: the entire body of the car was covered with hundreds of original stickers from the 70s, 80s and 90s previously stuck on top of adhesive film. The film was then gradually removed to be reassembled on a panel (displayed in the exhibition). As the ‘skin’ of stickers was removed, the image of the stickers was replicated on the bodywork. The painting is thus the ‘painted copy’ of those same stickers.

Prussia is a dark blue Fiat 500 from the 1970s, reduced to the bare essentials: with the windows, windows and headlights removed, what remains of the car is a sort of skeleton remnant, in which all the ‘holes’ have subsequently been concealed, tinned and plugged with other found metal sheets.