/ Federico Caputo

Federico Caputo (1995) is an emerging Italian artist living and working in Turin. He graduated in painting from the Albertina Academy of Fine Art in Turin (2018). Frederico has strong links with American-Italian artist Victor Kastelic (1964), in whose gallery Kspaces his work was included in many collective shows: Voce! (2018), The Store (2018), The Greatest Things/Le cose migliori (2018), Small History (2018) and Foreshadows/Prefigurazioni (2019). In 2020 he had a show l filo della storia (Museo ebraico, Lecce) in conjunction with the European Day of Jewish Culture (6 Sep 2020). Caputo is represented by Chiono Reisova Art Gallery (CRAG), based in Turin since 2016 and in Prague since 2019.

His artistic practice is pushing boundaries in terms of methods and materials. According to his statement on the CRAG website, it follows two threads: "the first is an intense interest in the aesthetics of fibre and textile arts, using both natural and synthetic material, with traditional embroidery and Italian tailoring acting as my main reference points; while the second is an exploration of myself, both in past and present terms, through contemporary pop icons, figures, and objects commonly found in the urban landscape."

A conceptual brick wall stands between hamburgers and slices of pie by Claes Oldenburg (1929–2022) from the early 1960s and Federico’s sewn and stuffed fruits and vegetables. Claes meant to bridge the gap between reality and art when he opened The Store – a shop full of sculptural and painterly objects – in Manhattan in New York in 1961. Today, Caputo is set out to substitute reality with art. Houseplants, cactuses, palm trees, stacks of fashion magazines, boxed grocery goods, TV reality-show heroes, national flags and ethnic carpets… all loosely sewn and stuffed with fluff. Bright colour fabric samples bought at a bargain. His installations replace the most unlikely-to-be-considered-artistic objects with a “more or less the same” attitude. Nobody is fooled by trompe-l'œil realism or awed by virtuoso sewmanship. Federico’s fruit merely exists alongside reality, filling in the empty spaces… making it brighter, softer, and playful.
– Kspaces Archive, Turin (2022)