As all the most innovative creations, the original reading of the Flying Dutchman proposed by Fabrizio Cotognini requires interpretative reference points and, being on topic, it demands to follow the paths of the great Masters of the XX century. For instance, the one tracked by Mark Rothko who, in 1943, cowrote with Gottlieb a letter to a reviewer of the “Times”: “we feel that the true significance of primitive art lies not merely in formal arrangements, but in the spiritual meaning underlying all archaic works”; and more: “We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.”. An aesthetic declaration that, in constant swap between past and present, sprays and nourishes as life blood also the research of Fabrizio Cotognini, which likes to be addressed as: “archaeologist of the contemporary”.
Both artists share references to Friedrich Nietzsche who described the misery of the contemporary man: “myth-less man remains eternally hungering among all the bygones, and digs and grubs for roots, though he has to dig for them even among the remotest antiquities”; for this so appreciated by the great American artist, as much as by the young and talented artist from Macerata which follows trails in the dust of the history of imaginary, at times slightly emerging, at time more definite and significative, as Captain Willem Van der Decken on the deck of the Flying Dutchman. The works of the two artists stage the tragedy of painting, sign, and writing, even with opposite manners and techniques: melted in veiling and fields of colour for one, underlined and deleted by pictorial and graphic incursions for the other; so, they present different actors but the same scenario.
Der fliegende Holländer, the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, culminates with the redemption and the victory of the superhuman strength of love, able to break the divine order of the eternal punishment by solving the tragedy in an ending of death and transfiguration, which provoked Friedrich Nietzsche’s wrath for the betrayal of the “Dionysian spirit”, namely of the tragic. On the other hand, Fabrizio Cotognini re-proposes the history of the Flying Dutchman to focus on the experience of art, too often reduced to a secondary and immaterial role, and to restore its place at the centre of the contemporary debate as the most powerful gear to know and confront both the Lebensstürme, the storms of live , and the “more actual and urgent themes of today society.”
Nietzsche once postulated that overturning the traditional perspective of an esthetical dimension flattened on the emotional learning of the audience leads to a more original and initial way of thinking about the art, enlightening the creative experience of the artist and his\her inclination for form and content. Fabrizio Cotognini leads the viewer, with the Nietzschean dictate in mind, and makes him\her experience the wild activity of his imagination which gathers and plants pieces of truth, raiding the immeasurable heritage of images and histories scattered by humanity during the centuries.
A century later, in the wonderful suite of halls of the piano nobile of Palazzo Buonaccorsi, as a new Warburg the artist builds, assembles, structures the charts of a new “Mnemosyne Atlas”, which magically emerge from the book as a direct and imaginative experience. A peculiar and bold variety of Pop up that unexpectedly unfolds and overflows in an engaging expositive path made of images closed in display cabinets, designed for a deep sounding, and sequential scenes reminding a storyboard project for a movie.
Cotognini chooses, selects, and produces an iconographic stock, drawing expressive images from the mnemonic tank of different cultural-historical contexts that succeeded over time and that, through metaphor and allegory, have attested and still attest the vitality of the history of ideas and power of imagination. He benefits from the most disparate documentations, from the biggest to the lesser production, from the most obvious to the most concealed, cooperating to define a Geistesgeschichte. Exactly as an archaeologist of culture, from the re-discovery of the creative and expressive function of the images, Fabrizio Cotognini builds an aesthetic apparatus with high mythopoeic potential, intended to activate a relational and empathic process of symbolic mediation between the artist, the viewer, and the everchanging reality of yesterday and today. Therefore, based on Warburg, in his project the artist begins from a thematic narration of the Flying Dutch to expand and cross disciplinary and environmental borders, towards different cultural contexts which gave its most varied representations.
In an imaginative-philological sequence, the artist retraces the course of the ghost vessel cutting through the sea of the unknown, signposted by a migratory bird which moved away from the flock to stand on the casket-box of the Atlas as an all-seeing guardian.
The navigation starts with favourable winds, enforced in Pop version by the t-shirt of Marco Van Basten and Robin van Persie, precious relic of the mythical “flying dutchmen” of the history of international football displayed on a glass case. The navigation continues around a majestic scenic tower, a genuine theatrical machine with backstage and scenes sketched by the artist which exhorts the viewer to enjoy the live-show inside the maquette-theatre, where is endlessly stage the theatre of life.
The journey continues at open sea, at times shaken by the storm, at times choked by tranquillity, with the damned ones of the Flying Dutchman, enigmatic presences signed by refined sculptures of sailors and heads of birds, which seem so familiar and close they could even be touched.
Until the crucial moment - direct quote from Der Fliegende Hollander by Richard Wagner - of the meeting of two vessels, the Norwegian and the Dutchman, in a yet stormy sea which summons many viewers from the shores to witness the conclusion of the tragedy of a captain in his last attempt to free himself from the deadly coils of the curse.
At last, the stage of redemption appears in the sublimation of love which leads to safe docks, but in the dimension of the transfiguration, blurred by the mirage and enchantment of a light that would be blinding and irresistible if it did not mix reality and fiction in an endless game of mirroring. The only possibility for reality to emerge to light, and therefore to the vision, in the domesticated and accessible semblance of the imago.
Taking part as actors of the “productive imagination” of Fabrizio Cotognini in this immersive journey, we fatally perceive a new experience of time, which is not anymore pure flowing of consecutive instants on an endless line because his artistic practice draws from a more original dimension, lacerating and stopping the flow of time. Using the iconographic repertoire of the past to build and dismantle images, through pictographic incursions and annotations that reshape them, precisely means to restore them to a “more original time”, in which Giorgio Agamben suggests that “artists and spectators recover their essential solidarity and their common ground”.
Fabrizio Cotognini builds his artistic project being aware of the deviation from the traditional system of culture, which exists only in the transmission of the beliefs and notions that nourish it, to the actual step of non-traditional societies characterized by the stocking of culture and from its distracted use. On the footprints of Joseph Beuys, playing the role of “artist as a provocateur”, Cotognini restores the link with the past through the cultural roots recovered by the quote; namely, through the estrangement-value which relights the aesthetic epiphany. He intentionally gives free rein to his never-ending inspiration, becoming for this an effective actor in the cultural formation of our world-environment, “where truth, every truth – recalls Carlo Sini – it’s a figure of a transit, or a figure in transit through a project, not as an object, but as a series of relationships, just as humanity is a path”.
To make this path more comfortable the artist gathers, in a stockpiling logic, all the communicative channels in a magnificent articulated narration which, even being open to incessant incursions through literature, cinema, theatre, photography and music, gives an absolute predominance to the know-how experience, based on a deep knowledge of techniques and materials. Constitutive elements and connective tissue of the alive writing of the body that, in his ability to relate, defines reality and builds the world, resewing past and present to outline with its rampant sign also the future. While in these halls from far strongly vibrates the echo of the “Theatre of signs” of Magdalo Mussio; signs which are wandering, stateless, at open sea, as the Flying Dutchman going adrift, but always in search of a dock in a new, albeit temporary and uncertain, original sense.