Fabrizio Cotognini is a composer, an artist-composer who develops a refined expressive language with musical accents, inscribed in a dual perspective. The approach adopted for his new solo exhibition, Divino Dialogare, focuses on the search for large and precious engravings linked to Raphael’s universal works, such as The School of Athens (1509-1511 ca.), The Fire in Borgo (1514), The Death of Ananias (1515-1516), The Coronation of Leo III (1517), and Self-Portrait with a Friend (1518-1520), translated by superb masters of the burin, Giovanni Volpato (Angarano, 1735 – Roma, 1803) and Raffaello Morghen (Portici, 1758 – Firenze, 1833), as well as on finding rare book editions from which he extracts poetic reproductions of the Muses of Parnassus. The valuable finds, recovered with constant passion, become palettes for Cotognini, elements on which he intervenes to make new chords resonate.
He creates original sensory devices that produce new visual “sounds” thanks to the tools of erasure and highlighting. In the first case, the pure white or elegant reflections of precious gold leaf mask portions of images shrouded in evocative mystery, without suffering the offence of brutal negation. In the second, theatrical gelatine cut-outs are used as optical filters to highlight details, illuminating elements that deny the hidden in order to be brought to light.
This process rejects any antiquarian view of Cotognini’s work, bringing it into the fertile realm of narratives, cloaked in a conceptual gaze where history dialogues with contemporaneity. The basic material – the sheets of engravings – is enriched with writing that precipitates around the images like margin notes, records from erudite research in dialogue with the origin and not with the simple past. Without forgetting the precious drawings, revealing the artist’s superb hand, conceived as source images and inscribed within rigorous geometric grids in constant dialogue like musical scores.
Cotognini’s recent works, while remaining within the established framework of his artistic research, reveal a particular sensibility, as they were created for the Bottega Giovanni Santi in Raphael’s birthplace, the legendary place where Raphael began his artistic apprenticeship as a child: they become devices, time machines designed to overcome the constraints of time, like many of the divine Master’s creations. It is enough to think of The School of Athens, an eternal masterpiece where ancient philosophers appear alongside artists and other figures contemporary to the great artist from Urbino.
The works, built on engraved bases, are intellectual puzzles whose solution requires active participation on the part of the viewer in order to decipher their varied references. They are not finished works in themselves, but devices that activate different meanings; open and layered works that offer the balm and driving force of multiplicity in a time of prevailing conformism.
As a further tribute to Raphael, recalling the Madonna of the Goldfinch, Cotognini also brings two sculptural installations to the house: a group of Hybridatio Mundi – bronze birds perched on a railing – and a skull with a bird in its mouth, in memory of the enigma linked to the cast of the Master’s skull.
Engravings, drawings, castings, patinas, gilding, plastics and marble are the diverse materials skilfully orchestrated by Cotognini to create a richly varied polyphony while maintaining a rigorous conceptual order. The artist’s complex visual architecture weaves a fertile dialogue with the lingering shadow of Raphael: a heartfelt tribute to the fundamental nature of art that transcends time and renews its splendour only thanks to the hands and minds of those who know how to listen to it. Cotognini has understood the lesson and faces the challenge by developing a language capable of giving voice to a divine dialogue.