The Art is a powerful tool able to touch people's hearts, to directly hit their sensibility and imagination through symbols and visual sensations. The works of Fabrizio Cotognini recombine traces with memories, material with intangible remains, geographies with territories, identity with nationality, history with the latest history of Art, directly touching my heart.
On 8th December 1965, the Second Vatican Council addressed all artists with a message: “It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the wear and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.” Contemplation and admiration are the only ways to understand beauty. Beauty is unexpected, it changes you, making you not only externally more beautiful or more cheerful, but more beautiful in the inside, and therefore better. The works of Fabrizio Cotognini accustom our eyes to the beauty, because as Dostoevskij stated in Demons: “mankind can continue without science, can continue without bread — it is only without beauty that we cannot continue, for there will be nothing at all to do in the world! That’s where the whole secret lies, that’s where the whole of history lies!”
The visual matter is not motionless: it needs to be broken and dismantled to be brought back to life, to become dialectically functional. Dissemination and aggregation, fragment and geometry become architectural principles in Cotognini's works, thanks to an assembly\dismantling of the image and its visibility; of its very contents.
The works of the “tattoo artist”, since Fabrizio is also a master in the art and technique of the tattoo, have their own harmony which gathers together different dimensions of reality and does not divide or consume them.
Fabrizio completes and further modifies his works establishing a “dialogue” between them and the word. The word is strictness, rule, convention and when it becomes “written word” it reaches its greatest abstraction as a sign. As wonderfully summarized by Hans Belting in Das echte Bild: “writing (...) lined up against the images and shattered their dominion. The alphabetic system translates the language into figures so that we can read it instead of listening to it (...) it holds the word, making us believe that we can illustrate it.”
Fabrizio is a really special and not common person, because he blends many qualities in the artist and the man: geniality and humility, proficiency and professionalism, constant research and coherence, true militancy and care for the others; qualities enriched by great generosity. He is a simple man and artist, never arrogant, never taking advantage of situations and people, always ready for dialogue and curiosity.
The works of Cotognini should not be observed with fleeting gaze, but they need time in meditation. As Paul Valery stated, the art teaches how to gaze; and the great Catalan painter Joan Mirò confessed that the art should not describe what could be seen, but it should seize the invisible in the visible.
The works of Fabrizio Cotognini educate the eye on the beauty and let us seize the invisible in the visible.
Aldo Colella
Collector, founder and president of Visioni Future.