"Resonance" by Federico Infante

About

This collection is especially exciting for it is made up of not only entirely new pieces, but also entirely new media: drawing studies, watercolors, and multimedia installations that combine painting and sculpture. 
And with new material comes new perspective. Infante has traditionally painted the realm of dreams, but here investigates the periphery of our reality—where things resonate between our world and our imagination, and result in our experience.

Drawing studies are often understood as preliminary works, rough drafts of something yet to come. Infante’s drawing studies are defined ideas and fully finished. They exist not as visual notes, but visual statements. The artist has a reputation for presenting protagonists in suspended animation. The characters of his drawing studies diverge from this to appear sketched from observation. Though still preserved from context, they maintain one foot on the ground. As if a bookish young lady reposed among ferns with a cat on her lap is something you might experience on your average commute. There is a documentary quality to these pieces that is both comforting and uncanny.

Infante’s watercolors are geometric compositions of sensual experience. Each work is a blueprint for synesthesia, suggesting one might remember a scenic stroll as the feeling of leaves falling, the flutter of birds seeking roost, and the fleeting glimpse of a lover caught in the perfect ray of sunlight. They are fragmented reality. A fractured encounter in collision. They float somewhere between a confluence of impressions and dimensions. What cubism does to perspective, Infante does to experience. 

Perhaps the most striking example of the artist’s growing artistic practice is his multimedia work. These hybrid pieces merge painting and sculpture to create installations that seem to puncture definitions, expectations, and worlds. Infante has at once exposed a permeable membrane and decimated it. Demonstrated the instability of a frayed edge and built a foundation on it. Each painting and sculpture could command respect as an individual work of art—but in conflux, they vibrate. Their dialogue extends beyond themselves to include viewers. When eye-level with an angelic woman wreathed in swirling foliage, do you impose boundaries on her atmospheric aura or does the hard edge evaporate to envelope you? Infante challenges us to decide whether our reality is leaking into the art or the art is reaching out to us. Or maybe this relationship is not determined, but under negotiation? Maybe, it depends on your experience.