Chakras, The Maps Beyond

Critical text

Critical text by Stefano Traini.

The works of Ivo Cotani, as the exhibition's title indicates, are maps: scale representations of places, but maps oriented by the body and its physical perceptions. The body is the absolute protagonist of these works, omnipresent and pervasive, with more or less explicit faces, arms, hands, fingers, sexual organs; stylised or solid bodies, erect or extended, compact or dismembered.

It is the body, with its perceptive apparatus, that determines the vision of the world, and in this Cotani's art is very phenomenological: it focuses on the perception of one's own body. at times it seems we are looking at radiographs. and on the perception of the external world, and so we see skies, stars, landscapes, ears of wheat. In one of the most interesting works the body is a large eye with frayed outlines that lets an inner world be glimpsed while looking "beyond".

The style moves between the modern and the pop: at times an Andy Warhol with elements of Rousseau the Customs Officer, with large, disproportionate, naive animals against bright highlighter-like yellows and oranges. The reference to advertising is evident not only in the compositional process. the shift from digital print to painting. but above all in the scenographic effect. The painting is not marked by lines but proceeds through fields of colour, partly geometric (digital) and partly free and shaded (pictorial).

The forms are heterogeneous because the abstract dimension is always alternated and combined with the figurative one: the coexistence of humanity and animality seems the result of a fascination with Egyptian art. Worth emphasising is the attention to the sacred, present both in the mythological dimension (the Mother Goddess, the satyrs) and in the more properly Catholic one: the nativity revisited with a disorienting modern language, and a last supper caught in its final phase, when everyone has gone and only animals remain to consume the leftovers. an irreverent reading recalling certain surrealist representations by Buñuel.

In all the works emerges the sense of a research that moves between maps, bodies, places, perception and the sacred: immersed in colours, forms and spaces, the observer is not only pleasantly struck, but above all induced to reflect.