Francesco Vezzoli: A True Hollywood Story!

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2007

Francesco Vezzoli: A True Hollywood Story!
Francesco Vezzoli
ITALY, 2007
Film installations, embroideries and paintings
Curated by Gregory Burke

Francesco Vezzoli is a particularly apt figure to appear in our first edition of Future Projections. He is stridently blasé about the intermixing of cultural forms and sees the moving image as both a well of inspiration and a medium in itself to express his ideas. His artistic stew combines the cinematic and the televisual with conceptualist jokes—invariably involving notions of film and TV celebrity—and the shock tactics of the Young British Artists. His most famous work to date is the justly celebrated Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, a re-imagining of Bob Guccione’s guilty pleasure of late-seventies pop porn. By taking the idea of the “trailer” so far out of the cinema context, Vezzoli sharply comments on the pop-culture and art personalities involved and the echoing nature of their/his (self-)promotion. Gregory Burke and the Power Plant team have produced the first major North American survey of this mercurially entertain- ing artist’s work, timed to open with this year’s Festival. We encourage anyone with even a slight interest in the borderlands between film and the visual arts to engage with this exhibition.
—Noah Cowan