Federico Solmi Shows The Bathhouse in Does This Taste Funny?

The Bathhouse (2020) is a five-channel video painting by Federico Solmi, 20 feet of synchronized screens framed in plexiglass and acrylic on wood. On them, leaders lifted from different centuries, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hernán Cortés among them, drink and carouse through a Roman villa while the night slides into circus acts and simulated war games. Solmi builds these works the way a studio builds a game: "step by step I got into gaming technology," he has said, performing his characters in motion capture and wrapping them in textures he paints by hand. The garishness is the argument: power as a party that never earns its glow.

It hangs in Does This Taste Funny?, a two-venue group show of roughly 40 artists on humor as a method for shifting perception, curated by painter Melissa Brown and artist John O'Connor. The Bronx half runs at Lehman College Art Gallery through Jan. 16, 2027, which Solmi noted in his announcement; a companion half at Sarah Lawrence College's Gallery at Heimbold runs through Dec. 13.

The Lehman roster puts Solmi beside Charles Atlas, Cindy Sherman and the Hairy Who painter Karl Wirsum; the Heimbold half includes Roz Chast and Jeremy Couillard, whose work also comes out of a game engine.