Hello Abraxass and welcome to the Ernesto Dolani community! How would you introduce yourself and your artistic practice? "My name is Davide Fossati, I'm a digital artist and art director, living and working in Milan. The main idea behind my work is to create textures and patterns through the technique of digital collage. The themes/topics I mostly deal with are nature, bodies, death, violence, sex, often in relation to each other. "
Central to your artistic research is the practice of digital collage. Where does the need to recover a practice whose history dates back long before the invention of digital technology come from? "I found myself using this technique because it was the one that best lent itself to realizing certain visions I had in mind in terms of textures and patterns."
The theme of Ernesto Dolani's FW25 collection is "fluid". Personally, I believe that art is entirely transsexual (or genderless, de-gendered): not necessarily on a thematic level but operationally, insofar as it blurs borders and remixes heterogeneous elements, making impurity a manifesto that prohibits any isolation. Do you find yourself in such a vision? Does the choice of collage also stem from here? "I agree with your vision, although as I said, I came to use this technique more for practical reasons than theoretical ones."
How do you select the elements for your collages? "For each photo/combination of bodies and elements, I select the one that best preserves the tension and identity of the act or the nature of the original context (I initially took the first details from pornographic photos on the internet). The idea is to create something abstract from concrete elements, so that the eye sees without recognizing. From this point of view, the encounter with Daido Moryama's Thighs series was crucial for me. In those photos, the physical element is aestheticized and made abstract while maintaining its power and erotic charge. With my collages, I try to do the same thing. "
Shoes are a recurring element in fetishistic impulses. What do you think is the reason for this privileged relationship between footwear and fetish? What role does fetishism play in your artistic practice? "Although I consider myself largely fetishistic and have also read several essays on the subject, I'm not sure I can give a comprehensive answer to this question. I think that as the foot is a fetish for the sexual organ, the shoe is for the foot, with the addition that it's also the envelope that hides/creates distance and therefore desire. Moreover, if you consider the symbolic value of stepping on, the idea of the foot as the "lowest" part of the body, other dynamics related to the BDSM world such as masochism, humiliation, etc., also come into play. In my art-making, fetishism plays the same role as other elements like violence, food, nature; these are things that interest me, question me, and therefore I try to know/understand through art. They are also realities that somehow, even if only visually, make me feel something, or at least they made me feel something when I started this type of work. "
To say goodbye: what are your future projects? Would you like to give our community some preview? "I'm working on creating a Porn Magazine inspired by 70s/80s pornography, a project I hope to launch by the end of the year and in which I've involved several photographers and performers. I've always been struck by the care that was once put into pornographic sets in terms of makeup, set design, etc. The ambition is to recreate something similar, but updated and contaminated by some of my personal elements."
