All love of my fresh eager soul merged into a great nostalgia and became tears, while the eye drank with bewitched gaze the tenderness of a distant blue.
H. Hesse
Continents and islands are part of a universe which has always been endless source of tales, images and visions contributing in the definition of the occidental culture. The depth of the oceans still hides the most concealed secrets. Open seas make the crews experience human isolation and the perception of the unknown.
At the end of the XVI century, Pierre De Lancre, one of the most feared French magistrate and inquisitor, stated that the sea was the origin of the diabolic vocation of a population. According to De Lance the fatigue, the daily uncertainty, the mandatory use of the stars as reference points, and the existence hanged on the infinite rough expanse caused the downfall of the faith in God and trust in the homeland. Then, the human being abandoned him\herself to the devil and to its ocean of tricks.
The navigation leaves human beings to the uncertainty of destiny, everyone to their own fate, every sailing could be the last. During the late middle age and the modern age, European lakes, rivers and seas were crossed by ships filled with lunatics and hopeless sick people. The Stultifera Navis reminds of a floating prison that encaged the “misfits”. A soul-ship abandoned to the infinite sea of desires hoping that God’s breath will guide it to safe docks. A floating asylum or an exclusion mechanism, as it could be interpreted today.
Therefore, seas belong to a privileged space which closely self-relates each human being in a heroic spirit. For this reason, the experience and narration of a short journey or of the crossing of a narrow point threatened by strong winds were filled with strong heroic flavour. Literature is full of bold characters and tales bound to the superhuman dimension, but not all of them are strong enough to deeply contaminate the culture.
The power of an art work has the strength to contaminate the cultural models of different countries, it has the energy to spread its own identity and transform the entirety of knowledge and beliefs of an age, of a social class or category, of an environment. Culture spreads as a virus, through contact. A three-dimensional picture of this concept lies in the Vatican state. The bronze statue of San Pietro in Cattedra, exhibited in the Basilica of San Pietro and carved by the XIII century’s sculpturer Arnolfo di Cambio, clearly shows a polished right foot where the fingers cannot be distinguished anymore. It is the mutation caused by the touching gesture of many pilgrims during the centuries. To experience the contamination, it is necessary to touch, to live the experience, to accept the contamination.
The exhibition The Flying Dutchman marks the path for a great théatron bound to the theme of the verb theaomai, to gaze, where Cotognini stages his work in a close dialogue with the historical spaces of Palazzo Buonaccorsi, plunged in the late Baroque triumph of Sala dell’Eneide. The meeting between the art of the present and the suggestive places of our museum heritage defines relationships, as simultaneous links between the culture of our time and the civilization of the past. The art work is an act of resistance which resists time and death.
Richard Wagner theorised the idea of a theatre as a total art work and experimented the research of the tautological dimension between art and life. He supervised the project of the theatre of Bayreuth, innovating it so that the experience of the viewer becomes total identification, hyper-fascinating for that time. The great orchestra and its director stayed in the “mystic gulf”, a hole beneath the stage which hid them, moving in this way the stage much closer to the viewer, the scene to the beneficiary.
The work of Fabrizio Cotognini is a great symphonic Overture which introduces the tale of the great work of The Flying Dutchman, defines its characteristics, and becomes the scenario of a geography at the same time half real and half imaginary. It is not a didactic tale, far from being pedantic; the artist sails over the deepest canyons with a “topgallant sail brigandine” and navigates as a corsair among the islands of the collective imagination, from the Mediterranean Sea to northern Europe. In the spectacularized choral vision the figure of the Flying Dutchman is proposed according to a multitude of different visions, from the most refined and cultured references to the most popular.
According to Guy Debord, the spectacle is the leading mean of production of the actual society; the spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images. The research about the Flying Dutchman belongs to a recent line of investigation, a new comparison with the gigantic theatrical works as Parsifal, Faust and Salomé which influenced the way of being occidental.
Europeans interpret the sea as a constant place of agitation which hides strange knowledge, it is a fantastic plain, a mysterious place of separation, the world upside down; precisely what represent the original printings on which Cotognini operates: the overturned vision of the world. In the fine art print, the engraver has a modus operandi reflecting as a mirror the reality of thing; to obtain a faithful result, right must be switched with left and vice versa. As behind a mirror the artist gazes the world from a privileged position, from a parallel and tangible dimension. The comparison with the inextinguishable source of the art’s graphic is one of the propulsions of Fabrizio Cotognini’s work. The intervention of the artist on the original printing is not by all means an iconoclastic action, but it stands as the structure of a dialogue with the strength of the past, with the dignified tradition. The perspectives could present an iconographical match, the signs are expressions suggesting the refined relation on the contents, not a formal relationship but the contraction of a distance. The tradition rises from its own ashes as an Arab phoenix in the eternal study of the claim on the current time.
“Viviamo in un Overlook Hotel a cielo aperto, cavalchiamo un serpente che continua a mangiarsi la coda e abitiamo in un mondo in cui il presente rigurgita davanti a sé sempre e solo copie sbiadite di un tempo che ci sembra di aver già vissuto.”
The highest quality of the formal representation and the tiny size of these printings make them most precious marvels. Philosophers, treatise writers, poets, history scholars, novelists, painters and peintres-graveurs left evidences of their attention towards the printing process; it means that the printing has a role similar to the writing for the transmission and knowledge of literature, painting, sculpture, and architecture, almost as a vector between word and image. The engraving and the printing, free from the debts to the other arts, become free re-elaboration of the materials according to the artistic invention. In this regard, the work of Cotognini breaks the chain of the representation, but his figures are work of pure invention.
It is mandatory to quote one of the most famous engraver-painter of all time, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn. Many of his self-portraits present tiny or tiniest dimensions and are extreme example of how the artist attempted to use the style and manners of the drawing in the etching. The chalcographic incision does not give the same results of the drawing, rather, it is its translation. The translation pursues that attitude towards the source language according to which the original echoes in the translation.
«… io ho veduto diverse sue Opere in stampa comparse in queste nostre parti, le quali sono riuscite molto belle, intagliate di buon gusto e fatte di buona maniera, dove si può argomentare che il di lui colorire sia di parimente di tutta esquisitezza e perfetione, et io ingenuamente lo stimo per un gran virtuoso.» So stated Guercino, around 1650, talking about Rembrandt in a letter to don Antonio Ruffo from Messina, who commissioned the painting of a pedant for a canvas of the Dutch artist exhibited in his collection.
Cotognini stands in this game of signs and languages, operating on the printing with a rich and most refined sign, made of twines and parallel lines typical of engravings.
About the art’s graphic in the territory of Marche region it is mandatory to quote an unmatched formative reality in the Europe of the early XX century, the Scuola del Libro in Urbino. Both in Italy and Europe, there were no other specific schools of production and decoration of the books. The school formed many artists that became famous later, many technicians as some engravers of the State Mint, and printers that edited the graphics of main stream artists of contemporary art in the ‘60\’70. The Scuola del Libro created a richest texture in coherence with the culture of the Urbino and Montefeltro territory; a culture that travelled from far, considering the patrimony of codex in the library of Duke Federico, preserved today at the Vatican Apostolic Library.
The exhibition of Fabrizio Cotognini has to be interpreted as corpus unicum made of archipelagos. In every art’s work, its standing as shape and organicity is evidences of an internal law which strictly builds it, and which could be addressed as unity of the art work. Every part relates with the total according to a double functionality: to build it, and to be built by it in a centripetal force addressed towards the Sala Dell’Eneide. The art work becomes more than the sum of its constituting elements.
The research of the rich sign in the detail is a recurring element typical of the work of the artist, almost as a returning obsession. The continuous crossing of borders is an irrevocable action for a spontaneous approach to the work. The artist could not avoid the new vision of an external space, alien to one’s own dimension and solidly enchained to the infinite crossroads.
In the maritime world, the optical effect defined Superior Mirage, or Fata Morgana, inspired many legends, among which the one of ghost ship of the Flying Dutchman, called in this was precisely because of the visions of sailors which attested hanged vessels, air or land castles. The esoteric suspension marks the border between two overturned dimensions, it is the horizon point in which the blue distances match in chromatic tones, the worlds of the sky and of the sea coexist. If the sea is the overturning of the world, the abyss represents its highest peak.