“Standing. Shirtless. Run over by leeches. Federico Pepe drinks wine. And the leeches begin to suck. He drinks more and more. He holds a small boat in his hands. The leeches crawl over his skin. They end up on the ground. He staggers. He slumps. Undone. The floor and the back wall, previously white, disappear. And the image suddenly becomes a drawing. Red marks, dark objects, the little boat abandoned to itself, red traces, dripping, a body in the centre.
An icon, a slowly evolving heraldic coat of arms, black background. A bizarre animation, now 2D, now 3D, partly on film. An organism that mutates, changes state and slips between being a celibate machine and a possible abstraction of the performance of drunken leeches. But also something else entirely. Or perhaps nothing at all.
The shot of Federico Pepe’s alcoholic performance and the bizarre animation face each other, projected on two large screens.
The soundtrack by Wang Inc. accompanies, contradicts and expands the images, transforming the environment into a large chamber of signs, signals and senses. Dissociated, dissonant, fatally consanguineous.
Separately, the pulsating centre of the entire project, a series of drawings. And an installation.
All this is Sinflex. A search, an exploration, a necessity and an obsession of Federico Pepe over the last year and a half.
All this is nonsense. Completely. It is a journey, a personal drift in which there is nothing to understand. To associate. To recognise.
Finally.
This is what we like. Not just the singularity, the openness, the crazy bounces in contemporary art history or imagery.And his being impeccable, but also open and disoriented.
We like that someone like Federico Pepe does things, works, apparently completely senseless. But full of meaning for himself.Because he feels like doing them. And he cannot do without them. Without ceasing to draw, not even for an instant, the fatal necessity of art”.