Francesco Finizio

Finizio's work is dictated by the overwhelming material saturation surrounding us. With simple yet sophisticated tools, he utilizes the resources available to him. By employing concrete and everyday means, Finizio's ongoing research into the languages and gestures of consumerism and mass communications, produce new and poignant articulations of our economic, cultural, social, political and artistic condition.

Through the use of DIY aesthetics and an often off-the-cuff approach full of humor and
self-irony, Finizio has been developing a unique and idiosyncratic body of work rooted in the observation of incidents and phenomena that revolve around questions of exchange and value, agency and cultural meaning. His installations operate as both events and models. They entangle the depiction of scripted spaces of commerce, habitat, display, construction, archive and work, with a model-like quality that actively speculates on the uses, statuses, and sentiments that these spaces perform.

Since nothing is certain under the rule of capital, we are all busy speculating - both the investment banker and the precariat, are constantly compelled to create models by which they can conduct themselves. The only invariant element in these models is the perpetuation of the market economy. Under capital, speculation has changed from independent and inverted thinking, to a way which ensures that the economic and political world remains intact.

With their playful makeshift style, Finizio's clever installations push a given situation to its breaking point, revealing contradictory states and hidden dimensions of the economic world we live in. By proposing the familiar world as it is folded inside-out, Finizio's work suggests a mode of operation that we can call counter-speculation.

Joshua Simon, excerpt from the press release for the ARKPARKCRAFTRAFTCLINICCLUBPUB exhibition at MOBY, Bat Yam, 2015