Ultra Male

Critical text

Critical text by Valerio Schito.

The body as a device of possibility. In ULTRA MALE, Cotani stages a silent, sensual revolution of the body and its representation. Far from asserting an identity, his work dismantles its very foundations: the works. works on paper, paintings and modular sculptures. do not tell us what a body is, but evoke its transient, open, imaginary nature.

The exhibition's title is a semantic trap, a conceptual game oscillating between the "ultra-male" and the "beyond evil". Cotani works precisely on that ambiguous boundary, destabilising the grammar of gender and form through an aesthetic that blends eroticism, childhood, the sacred and mutation. Here the body is no longer a stable sign but a field of possibility, a surface on which to write new stories without having to fix their ending.

The works on paper. fragile, transparent, almost prayer-like. are the visual heart of the show. In the drawings the line is essential, childlike, sharp: light figures that smile and bend, bodies revealing nipples like flowers, red phalluses as joyful, sensual, surreal emblems. Cotani does not illustrate, he alludes. He does not build a message to interpret, but a rite to pass through. Every figure is an identity that dissolves with grace, a doubt that laughs.

Alongside these evanescent presences, his sculptures offer a tactile, transformable counterpoint. Demountable, modular, mutant, they appear as true devices of freedom: phalluses, breasts, arms, heads become interchangeable elements in an organism that refuses the norm and embraces the heterogeneous. It is the surgeon's gesture meeting the child's: anatomy as symbolic play, as the possibility of redrawing oneself. The statue becomes an organism, a living object that accepts the intervention of the other, mutating along with the gaze.

ULTRA MALE does not thematise gender: it crosses it, breaks it, re-dreams it. We are not facing a social denunciation, but a poetic operation acting on a deeper level: that of the rite, of vision, of the body that plays at being without ever having to explain what. It is an altar. not to identity, but to its dissolution as a creative act.

To enter this exhibition is to access a terrain of metamorphosis. Here the viewer can be both spectator and author, witness and sculptor. Ambiguity is a gift, not a threat. And every possible configuration. from the erotic chimera to the imperfect god. becomes a celebration of the freedom not to choose. With tenderness and subversion, Ivo Cotani asks us to unlearn the body as a finished fact, and accompanies us on a journey in which art becomes a laboratory of transformation, a collective breath, a disorienting and necessary rite.