The Brooklyn Rail

Federico Solmi (b. 1973) has long veered away from subtlety. His current exhibition, Adrift, announces itself the moment you walk in. Solmi’s epic painting, The Ship of Fools (2024) occupies an entire gallery wall. It boasts 122 by 237 inches of deep blue ground covered in dense white lines, each figure rendered in a style that reads like three-dimensional wireframe geometry. It is a painting built to overwhelm, and it does, not only in terms of its scale, but through the saturation and foreboding sense that power exists primarily as image.

Solmi’s inspiration is Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–19). Géricault documented the wreck of the French frigate, Medusa, off the coast of Senegal in 1816, during a colonial mission associated with the slave trade. The ship’s captain, appointed more through political connection than competence, loaded high-ranking officials into the lifeboats and left some 150 others to build a makeshift raft. After days of murder and cannibalism at sea only ten survived. When the painting premiered at the Paris Salon, it shocked audiences with its graphic nature and its implied indictment of a ruling class willing to sacrifice the most vulnerable.

Solmi inherits this same socio-political structure, yet inverts the moral. His raft isn’t populated by the desperate; it’s packed with some of the world’s most powerful people, all of them oblivious to being adrift. Mark Zuckerberg, drunkenly incapacitated, takes the place of Géricault’s drowned corpse, while Donald Trump is frozen mid-performance. The rest of the passenger list—Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Marie Antoinette, Kim Kardashian, Warren Buffett, Empress Theodora, Vitalik Buterin, Pope Benedict XVI, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Hernán Cortés, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Christopher Columbus, and Ramesses II—covers millennia and various media ecosystems. They are arranged so that imperial ambition and celebrity sink in the same vessel. Moral equivalence isn’t the point here; the flattening of distinction is. The artist implies, visually speaking, that these are people who have never considered that they might be the problem, or that they may be moving without direction or purpose.

Up close, the painting rewards time. The white lines are dense, with different textures across different figures (fine mesh in some sections, geometric patterning in others, and a cyan glow that makes certain figures appear to radiate from the dark ground). Some passages read almost like lacework, while others are closer to engineering diagrams. The overarching composition is chaotic—and deliberately so. Figures and objects are compressed with no clear hierarchy, and no single focal point pulling the viewer’s eye into order. Near the right edge, slightly apart from the chaos, three figures sit in quiet debate: Larry Ossei-Mensah (a curator), Lawrence Weschler (a critic), and Socrates (the philosopher). A luminous halo surrounds them, distinguishing them from the crowd through light. Solmi doesn’t position them as heroes, but he does give these subjects a unique relationship to the surrounding spectacle.

The adjacent gallery holds three of Solmi’s “video paintings,” which merge painting with video in a way that creates genuine tension instead of resolving into either medium. The Indulgent Wanderers (2026), crafted in acrylic, paint, and mixed media on plexiglass with an LED screen and video loop, places Melania Trump center frame in an explosion of red feathered garments, arms spread wide, a broad-brimmed hat tilted back, sunglasses on, dancing or otherwise performing for no one in particular. She’s surrounded by figures in vivid yellow robes and deep purple military dresses, all equally unselfconscious, all also in sunglasses. They stand on a boat deck against turquoise water and a painterly sky, snow or confetti drifting through the frame. The paint surface is thick and gestural while the bodies move with the fluidity of digital animation. The Unrestrained Ones (2026) shows a figure in ornate red and gold armor, arms flung open above turquoise water, daisies and birds scattered through the frame, a magenta figure wreathed in flowers rising behind them. The Night Drifters (2024) is the largest of the three. All three begin as hand-drawn images and paintings that Solmi then scanned, mapped onto three-dimensional digital models, and animated using video-game engines, along with motion capture and digital scripting. And the finished loops never resolve; they simply repeat (which, one might argue, is the entire point). But repetition here risks becoming indistinguishable from the spectacle it critiques, less an exposure of excess than its continuation.

Rounding out the exhibition is The Bacchanalian Ones (2021), a virtual reality experience for Oculus Quest 2 that places visitors directly inside Solmi’s world, and a façade projection of American Circus (2019) planned for a lecture event on April 16. Born in Bologna and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, Solmi has shown everywhere from the Venice Biennale to the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Adrift succeeds because it refuses moral clarity, staging a world in which critique collapses into image. In Solmi’s world, no one is steering, but everyone is performing. The question is whether we are watching the spectacle, or already part of it.