THE MOTHER: Så ses vi åter min dyre son!
THE DUTCHMAN: Älskade moder, så ses vi igen! Jag har seglat mina sju år, men utan mål, och hamnen ser jag endast hvart sjunde år. Hvad förestår mig nu för pröfning?
THE MOTHER: Mitt barn, det vet Du ju!
THE DUTCHMAN: Detsamma som förut?
THE MOTHER: Ja!
THE DUTCHMAN: Alltså det svåraste! Hur många gånger skall jag ta om det samma?
THE MOTHER: Tills Du består profvet! utan att klaga.
August Strindberg, Holländarn
Art and alchemy share a long-lasting relationship that dates to the dawn of time. The figure of the alchemist is closely linked to the artist. The alchemist is defined as "the creator" and the alchemy Magna Ars: the "Great Art"; while the alchemical process is addressed to as Opus, the “Grand Opera”. This semantic proximity was carefully conceived to highlight or suggest a conceptual sharing of objectives and results among the two disciplines.
It could even be stated that art has always been alchemical, both in theory and from a technical point of view: it is enough to think about the daily activities in which the artist uses manual skills. In painting, actions as grinding mineral and vegetal parts, measuring and mixing the amount of colouring, and diluting the materials with binding agents to create pigments. In sculpture, it concerns the experimentations regarding the properties of metals and the foundry procedures. In the artistic experience, the meeting with alchemy often happens precisely because of the instrumental need to test unchangeable pigments or better techniques to shape the material, in an irreducibly romantic attempt to challenge time and give immortality to one’s own work.
From a thematic and theoretical point of view, for centuries art has drawn upon the vast alchemical symbology, filling the artists’ works with figures, emblems, representations, and allegories that seem arcane today since they refer to neo-platonic Hermeticism and Rosicrucianism. The iconology allows us to gaze through the interpretative lens of alchemy, the works of many artists that dot the occidental history of art, from the Renaissance to the present. On the other hand, as Arturo Schwarz properly observed: “The alchemist and the artist share the same ambition: that of doing to understand, and of understanding to transform, both themselves and the world. Alchemy and art aspire to become both a knowledge system and an instrument of transmutation.”
It seems enough to consider the works of Jan van Eyck, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Giorgione, Cosimo Rosselli, Hieronymus Bosch, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Dosso Dossi, Lorenzo Lotto, Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Rosso Fiorentino, Tiziano, Parmigianino, Domenico Beccafumi, El Greco, Domenico Fetti, Georges de La Tour, Rembrandt, Guercino, Guido Reni.
Moreover, during The Short Century (Eric Hobsbawm), other reference works are those of Marcel Duchamp, Victor Brauner, Salvator Dalì, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Vasilij Kandinskij, Paul Klee, Kazimir Malevič, Jackson Pollock, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Matthew Barney, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Cuoghi, Damien Hirst, Rudolf Stingel. In Italy, the works of Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Gilberto Zorio, Gino de Dominicis, Vettor Pisani, Lucio Del Pezzo, Mimmo Paladino. A thin fil rouge stretched over the spatial-temporal differences links these very different figures, in whose research symbols of hermetic and alchemic nature often recur and chase each other.
The Grand Opera of Fabrizio Cotognini reminds me of the modus operandi belonging to a Renaissance artist, whose Weltanschauung stands between the research of a graphical representation of the world and the desire to establish it as personal scientifical inquiry, in the attempt to dominate reality in a phenomenological way. That is why the practice of drawing is central in the work of Cotognini; it stands as the genuine core of his Opus, expression of a contemporary and visionary Theatrum mundi, inside which lie the symbolic images that dwell in his expressive vocabulary, in his thematic anxieties and his obsessions. The figurative culture of Fabrizio Cotognini intentionally meets the theatre and the performance; the result is an unscrupulous hybridization of different media, used as endlessly adjustable and declinable elements, as theatrical equipment and props, whose reality is dismantled to be revealed later thanks to a mechanism of progressive unveiling of meaning.
Overall, it seems to me that the research of Fabrizio Cotognini is deeply characterized by what I like to define, in accord with Giorgio Agamben, an archaeological approach to the present; namely, by the constant reference to the elder, used to finely investigate the apprehensions and anxieties of our contemporary times. Therefore, “Historical investigation of the past is only the shadow cast by the theoretical interrogation of the present”. Cotognini draws from the iconographic repertoire of the past, studies medieval herbals and bestiaries, and is interested in the alchemical and mysterosophic secrets. The artist spread these secrets in sequences of images and stories, hybridizing them with post-apocalyptic dystopic vision, inspired by cyberpunk suggestions, or rather, by a hypothetical science-fiction dystopic future.
Cotognini weaves elements from divergent temporal stratification, setting them in a parallel dimension characterized by slipping, folds and discontinuity. It is not a case that in his expressive vocabulary, a symbolic value is ascribed to the use of ancient engravings, wisely modernized to create a surprising “archaeology of the present” that emerges from real palimpsest-works, from ready-made modifié on which the artist operates with veiling of colours. Overlaps are sometimes slight and almost transparent, at times thicker and material, which brings out remnants of figuration that suggest an aesthetic of the emphasised fragment. These superimpositions activate a process of rarefaction but also of praise and resemantization of the images that merge into a potential infinite archive of memory, from which resounds the echo of a very personal symbolic universe.
I met Fabrizio Cotognini when he was a student at the Fine Arts Academy. Over the years, I had the chance to follow the evolution of his work, always consistently bound to a highly coherent unity of thought and planning and linked to a serious theoretical research; the Grand Opera of Fabrizio Cotognini, always formally flawless and conceptually exemplary, has always been supported by his research. His last works, exponentially grown in ambition and dimensions, are based on a theatrical syntax which, in a constant game of cultured references and quotes, unscrupulously re-uses and hybridizes different media as adjustable and endlessly declinable elements.
The Flying Dutchman (2021) is a complex project which presents a plurality of media, from drawing to installations, from sculpture to animation, and it is conceived as a unique monumental environment: an immersive and obsessive space in which the viewer is cataphract; a dystopic place where past, present and future, flattening on themselves, fuses and confuses themselves. Cotognini builds here a real “theatre of the image”, in which the space of art meets the time of theatre.
The legend of the vessel doomed to sail forever with no possibility of relief - because of a broken code related to the honour, to the sea or to the gods - is a narrative archetype, apparently born in the context of north European folklore. Almost a maritime version of the legend of the Wandering Jew, guilty to have taunted Jesus on the way to the Calvary and doomed for this to live until the end of the world, aging without the possibility of death. With no rest, solace and peace. The Flying Dutchman is a paradigmatic narrative of the Promethean hybris also shared by the Homeric Ulysses: a mental blindness which forbids humankind to recognize its own limits and to proportionate its own strength; therefore, it conveys the arrogance, the pride, the conceit of who defies him\herself and God to push his\her own boundaries. Many are the works inspired by the legend, above all: Der Fliegende Holländer by Richard Wagner (1843).
The Flying Dutchman of Cotognini restores an intermedial expositive path (Rosalind Krauss) paved with drawings, modified engravings, sculptures and installations inspired by the various representations of the Flying Dutchman occurred over the centuries. As usual in Cotognini’s practice, there is a balanced alternance of references from both the tradition of the history of art - from Willem van de Velde to Andreas Achenbach, from Osvaldo Licini to Anselm Kiefer; and the literary tradition - from Richard Wagner and August Strindberg to Joe R. Lansdale. In addition, these sources meet the comics universe (Scrooge McDuck and The Flying Dutchman), the cartoon world (the hilarious Frying Dutchman in the famous tv series “The Simpson” 2017), and the cinema (the ghost ship in Pirates of the Caribbean, by Gore Verbinski, 2006).
The Flying Dutchman of Fabrizio Cotognini gathers and revamps these representations, restoring a succession of level-sequence and images-editing (Didi-Hubermann) which connect visions, quotes, homages, discoveries and rediscoveries of novelists, poets, playwrights, singers, cartoonists, film directors and artists. A theatre of polyphonic and meta-temporal narrations set in a cyclic time, where the historical-literary tradition rises again in the eternal pursuit of modernity, successfully attempting to give shape to a synesthetic and atemporal sensorial experience.
The dystopic and alchemical Grand Opera of Cotognini presents heterogeneous times and offers a kaleidoscopic vision emphasized by the multiple media used and by their hybridization, gazing in the wrinkles of the history of art with provocatively anachronist eyes. Here, the dream of the total theatre of Piscator meets the Cine-eye of Dziga Vertov, the pre-cinema machines of William Kentridge meets the alchemical anxieties of Vettor Pisani.
After all, as Giorgio Agamben acutely states: “Those who are truly contemporary, who truly belongs to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demand. They are in this sense irrelevant; but precisely because of this condition, precisely through this disconnection and this anachronism, they are more capable than others of perceiving and grasping their own time.” Therefore, according to the philosopher, contemporariness emerges from a peculiar relationship with one’s own time; namely, throughout a time lag and an anachronism set between archaic and modern, the actual and the untimely, time and fashion, light and darkness. In my opinion, it is precisely in this irreconcilable relationship that lies the Wesen of the Grand Opera of Fabrizio Cotognini; that is, the whole of his dated contemporariness.