De Molfetta. Neo pop pays homage to the work of one of the most important figures of contemporary art.

Football has been my passion and my profession for forty years, along with my passion for contemporary art. I discovered Francesco De Molfetta and I am enraptured every time I see one of his works. Contemporary art is subjective, sometimes very serious. But to be able to smile in front of a work of art is fantastic’. Thus, with the omissions necessary for synthesis, Giuseppe Damiani known as Oscar, football player of times gone by, witty and attentive collector known as Demo, artist of modern times, player of forms, concepts and figures. The Demo, already defined on these pages in past editions as a rock artist, before being a pop artist, it is appropriate today that he is renamed ludoartist par excellence, and on the occasion given by the theme of this edition. De Molfetta does not lack the profound spirit of culture, literary and theatrical, as well as merely artistic. But precisely for this reason, in the face of so much knowledge, the most beautiful virtue he keeps alive, and always crackling with burlesque, light-hearted, sarcastic even, but joyful and playful gimmicks in itself, is precisely a sort of healthy ludopathy - of which he is also a healthy carrier for those infected by it - in gesture and artistic invention: lucid, fervent, bubbly, irresistible. The range of the Demo’s cultural knowledge, to be treated in a playful hilarious form, is practically the entire known universe of artists, writers, poets and every other form of mankind. There is no tradition, no cultural cliché, no national monument, no literary sacred monster, no academic convention, no advertising totem, no mass-communication cliché, no childhood dream that has not been plastically arranged by the artist in the form of elegiac, playful mockery. More often modelling resinous or polyethylene materials, but the most graceful peaks - almost sublime heights - of demological ludo-art, so to speak, are well described in the exquisite, hilarious porcelain, extracted, covertly and jokingly - as the magician Forest or Silvano, the magician from Milan, would do - from a cylinder of inexhaustible comic imagination. Here are obese Barbie and Batman, here are contrite but colourful Teletubbies, here is the innocent. - By Sciortino P. in ArteIn