emlex nelle arti. Esposizione Collettiva 2024 – Fabrizio Cotognini

emlex nelle arti. Esposizione collettiva 2024

curated by Caterina Verardi

Artists: Paolo Ventura, Ramak Fazel, Fabrizio Cotognini, Andrea Francolino, Goldschmied e Chiari

From March 7th to March 28th, 2024
Vai Santo Spirito 3, Milan

Architecture is an element that each of us must relate to countless times during any one of our days. We are obliged to come into contact with the beauty, expressed or absent, of a designed space.

Architecture is a powerful reality capable of giving life to spaces and places, which in turn are capable, day after day, of shaping those who look at or pass through them.

The selected artists are united by having chosen to look inside this very special relationship, between architecture and our reality, and have been able to build a unique dialogue between space and what it represents, expanding and exploring its every potential undertone.

The exhibition is a journey that leads us to relate with a reading of space that is increasingly abstract but then, in a circular way, connects again with a profound concreteness.

Cotognini’s artworks on the original engravings tell us of spaces that come alive like stage sets, that are coloured and decomposed, opening up to a broader reflection that continues beyond the limits of the original sheet.

The artwork XII Visione 2 starts the dialogue by showing us a Venetian perspective taken from Canaletto’s works, and leading us into the reflection are the protagonists of acception: pigeons. Animals capable of animating both the iconography of contemporary art and the daily struggles of citizens, who feel infested by them. These birds represent a faceless menace, yet each of them is unique and different. They are highly intelligent animals, able to survive in hostile environments and migrate through complex routes. And it is precisely this innate intelligence of theirs that makes the urban threat as real as it is attractive. They inhabit and watch over architecture, they move around it probably even better than the people who live in it. So much so that we feel we are being watched and violated by the gaze of these ante litteram drones, which, moreover, were employed for this exact purpose during the Great War.

As often happens in Cotognini’s works, also in For everything there is a fixed time, and a time for every business under the sun, the dialogue is animated by the geometric and evocative correspondences between the birds that gracefully and sensitively approach the true protagonist of the composition: an imaginative, theatrical, geometric and perspectival architecture.

Looking for a sense of baroque wonder, we entrust our journey inside this work to the one who can boast an alternative and inspired vision: the artist we ask to be able to make the viewer’s mind dream and fly, beyond the contingent, to reach a freer, deeper and more enlightened state.