Leaving a mark in art: joseph farine, mike wolf & andy picci

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MAY 17, 2016

LEAVING A MARK IN ART: JOSEPH FARINE, MIKE WOLF & ANDY PICCI

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We are all dying to be different and remembered, aren’t we? Each of us “thirsty” to have our individuality recognised and preserved. For the protagonist on the stage of today’s flourishing art scene, a thirst for individuality goes beyond vanity and becomes a crucial, career-defining necessity.

Regrettably, for aspiring artists, faced with an over-saturated and over-commercialised market, being noticed has become increasingly difficult.

We talk to three creatives Joseph Farine(http://andataritornolab.ch/) (Geneva), Mike Wolf(http://www.wolfmike.com/portraits/) (Lausanne) and Andy Picci(http://www.andypicci.com/keepcalm/2015/10/9/keep-calm) (Paris) about their desire to create, what defines timeless art and how they came to work together.

Joseph Farine: the Iconoclast Who is Joseph Farine and why can he be called an iconoclast, an attacker of outdated institutions and beliefs? Well, for the last few years, Joseph Farine has been the curator of Andata Ritorno(http://andataritornolab.ch/), an independent “laboratory” for contemporary art in Geneva. What makes him iconoclastic is his consistent ability to weed out the original, the innovative, the cutting edge and the avant-garde from among each new generation of freshly budding artists.

Farine, or Jophiel as I like to think of him, a patron of beauty and art, spoke to OURS about the challenges confronting today’s new artists. In particular, he addressed the challenge facing young artists as they fight to maintain their individuality in the face of the post-modern, post-Warhol, factory-like production of overly commercialised graduates by art schools, all to suit the taste of today’s “common” culture. Farine is emphatic in his belief that this problematic can be reduced to three individual issues: 1. The age of collecting art for the love of art is now long gone, replaced instead by one of taxes and finance.

2. Collectors of distinct, individual taste and truly artistic sensibilities are becoming more and more rare.

3. The manipulation of the market and tyranny over artistic taste by large international art galleries and curators, create an adverse formula for commercialisation, the focus on catering to public opinion rather than the quality of the work of the artist, says Farine.

He believes that anything and everything is possible today, which conversely proves to be a stumbling block. “We live in a world in which there has been an explosion of potentialities,” he explains, “creating a situation of infinite potentialities for artistic expression, which has also made it more and more of an arduous task to discern quality from the quantity of the mass.”

He says that art is relative to and reflective of the morals, values, ideologies, and passions of the artist as well as those of the epoch in which they live, and truly special when it remains timeless, able to forever enrich human life. Arguing that the best artistic works act not only as a mirror of the interior workings and mind of the artist themselves, but of the society in which they exist. He says, “Art is an innate and insatiate compulsion for creative expression.” Despite the obstacles he says, “Despite the financial, social and cultural pressures you might encounter, try to remain true to yourselves as there is room always in the world for someone original.”

Mike Wolf & Andy Picci

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Photograph by Mike Wolf Three years ago, in a random yet unforgettable and irreversible chance re-encounter, a lone wolf, maverick, poetic aesthete, self-conscious idealist and bold visionary named Mike Wolf met a mad busker, hard rocker, night-time graffiti artist, rogue poet and righteous photographer named Andy Picci, and, well, the rest was history.

Neither of them knew they were heading to the same place, on the same plane, to visit the same person (Farine), and although they had already crossed paths once before, this time their recognition of one another as creative brothers would come swift and hard. During that hour and a half flight, a bond was forged that would lead to an exciting and unique collusions of minds, both men sharing the same type of “thirst� for artistic expression.

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Photograph by Mike Wolf Both artists share an almost unsettling sense of self-awareness, as artists and as individuals, and therefore tend to take a self-deprecating, rather than playful attitude to life itself, as well as their work.

Their form of creative expression focuses on the act of revealing rather than concealing, and focuses on feeling rather than over intellectualisation as they explore enormous technological, cultural and social changes such as globalisation, as well as the impact of the numerous economic, financial and political crises in the West.

The similarities between their artistic vision and that of a current cultural movement known as metamodernism is striking, as the two rebel artists engage in a constant battle between two contradictory aesthetic poles: grand narratives and subtle poetries.

This, however, is where those apparent similarities come to the end of the road, for in their collaborative efforts, in which Wolf’s eagle eye and subtle, refined style perfectly entwine with Picci’s uses broad strokes and bold statements.

The Wolf: Mike Wolf

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The Lausanne-based artist has been active in photography since 2008. He works predominantly with reportage, nature, ambience and portrait photography. Wolf (his professional, not his real name, given

to him by friends) calls his work a form of “reportage”, which is far too modest a term to describe his astoundingly insightful, vital and profound perception and understanding of humanity and the world in which we exist.

His style can be summed up in three words – simplicity, honesty and purity – which remain faithful to an aesthetic principle simultaneously poetic, romanticised and meta-modernist. He captures the essence of the human soul in one singular, solitary shot, or “frame” in the most private seemingly public of moments.

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Wolf shrugs and says with the same refreshing honesty and poignant simplicity found in his work, “For me, what’s most important is not just the manner of photographing, but the material. I work with short focus, for example, in order to isolate the principal elements of the subject matter in its context.

Focusing on the individual is what also creates atmosphere and establishes intimacy. My desire is to frame them in a way so that each image can and should speak for itself. It helps that I know what I like, what inspires me and what I am trying to transcribe.”

The Dandy “Anartist”: Andy Picci

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Central Saint Martins graduate Picci, also from Lausanne, currently lives in London, so the two artistic blood brothers currently share from a distance. “We live in a world full of images; the value of an artwork involves the comparison of data from multiple sources such as collectors, dealers, galleries, auction houses, consultants and specialised market analysts, to arrive at a value,” he states. “Even if it is more of a financial rather than an aesthetic concern, subjective views of cultural values play a big part as well,” he explains.

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The artist cheekily describes himself as a bit of thief. “Most of my work is about appropriation, as working with borrowed elements allows me to explore, expose, extend, criticise and analyse the qualities, meanings, ideas and values associated with the different objects or images,“ Picci says. He says appropriation permits him to critique the work, “by modernising a previous existing work, changing the aesthetic of it and giving it a different meaning, or questioning its value and by encouraging the viewer to re-question the meaning of art and life.”

He says his interests lie in “society’s approach to globalisation, fame, idolatry and particularly the transformation of mass-culture images to create new artwork.”

“There are no real limits. Everything can be re-interpreted or modified, even people themselves,” says Farine.

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