AFANTINI

VAN SANGRE The Art and Times of AFAN The new artbook of AFAN Alessandro Fantini Now available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0bpv1Jd9 https://amzn.eu/d/04lYl9FZ Born seventeen years after the death of his celebrated namesake and fellow countryman, who died during a stage of the Tour of Germany, Alessandro Fantini was reborn as AFAN to embark on his “multimedianic” artistic path. His rebirth came thanks to the “rumble of a pyrotechnic thunder” that, one late spring evening, fertilized the migrainous silence of an empty room. Since then, the stages of his personal epic have unfolded from the cozy “geological wound, festering between mountain and sea” that is the Sangro Valley in Abruzzo. His journey has been marked by sounds and colors captured at the border between a populous solitude and a kaleidoscopic blindness propitious to visions. Visions projected over 30 years onto hundreds of canvases and sheets that have become “shrouds of astral bodies” and “x-rays of intuitions.” For the

February 2, 8:30 pm (CET) The fateful moment has come. "EGO REFLUO" the new AFAN's concept album is out on Bandcamp and on the several music streaming services. https://afanalessandrofantini.bandcamp.com/album/ego-refluo Constantly mediating between the realm of instincts and the sphere of social norms, human Ego defines itself by tackling the external world along the edge of chaos, swinging from greediness to generosity, from compassion to indifference, from pride to sense of sacrifice. In 21st century, fed by the ever-developing media technology and digital ways of amassing humongous wealth, Ego is exposed to unprecedented chances of reaching Godlike size. While Artificial Intelligence is heading to over-sizing it in an impending future, Ego finds itself at a last crossroads: being cannibalized by his own overflowing narcissism and reduced to a toxic waste of humanity, or accepting to be just a tiny part of a wider flux, thus flowing back to the stream of the unified consciousness.

Since the 90s, Rome has been the setting of many human and artistic adventures of mine. During school trips, I never missed the opportunity to sketch details of monuments and alleys in my notebooks, or to hunt for art books in the bookstores of Piazza Navona and Campo dei Fiori. I wore out my shoes by visiting all the museums, art galleries, foundations, and churches of the city, even coming to perceive the brushstrokes up close while observing a plethora of masterpieces such as those by Caravaggio, Tiziano, Reni, Carracci, Klimt and Guttuso. Along Via Barberini, I crossed paths with Nanni Moretti, whom I filmed for a quarter of an hour as he impassively talked on the phone on his Vespa, as if he had just finished shooting the first episode of “Dear Diary.” Early in the morning, I engaged in a friendly conversation about cinema and music with Lucio Dalla after spotting him sitting alone at a table in Piazza della Repubblica. More than once, I acted as a guide for English