Fabrizio Cotognini
Reversed Theater
Edited / curated By
Lorenzo Benedetti Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation
In the new project presented to the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, the artist from the Marche region creates overlaps between history, literature and science.
Fabrizio Cotognini, through drawing, sculpture, installation and sound, focuses on the theme of the Goethe exhibition on Faust.
The work is linked to the research of Jean-Francois Niceron with his Thamaturgus Optica published in 1646 in which he develops the potential potential of perspective, reaching anamorphosis as one of the extreme points.
This practice comes out in the way that Cotognini builds the exhibition scene. The composition of drawings, sculptures and other display devices are created to construct a complex labyrinth of perspectives, in which everything can re-enter and in which it reconstructs the history of Faust. This combination of different times is achieved by the artist's use of antique 18th century theater prints on which he designed the various scenes of the work. The past becomes a basis for building new perspectives, new bonds, opening new points of view.
The original images of the ancient theater prints are elaborated with additions of drawings that build new perspectives within the image. The Faust is reconstructed through diagrams, drawings and texts that go to recompose a new imaginary space. Cotognini through the drawing, the sculpture and the installation manages to deform the real perspectives creating new spaces for the imagination.
The overlap that Cotognini creates sees a dialogue between the architecture of the theater and the work, a dialogue that is perceived in the soundtrack of the exhibition created by the artist singer Blixa Bargeld.
In the work of Cotognini a character can only live in a theater of paper, an art in which the characters will be identified with different simultaneous visions by means of colors representing moods and metaphors. So we are faced with a new eternal Faust that returns to being the Thaumaturgus.
Text by: Lorenzo Benedetti