Gold is tested by fire,
and human character is tested
in the furnace of humiliation (SIRACH 2:5)
In the complexity of an age in which the museal space acquired also the value of “last location of the human experience”, witnessed and narrated by objects carrying “history” and “stories”, it is necessary to overcome the claim according to which the plurality of points of view, approaches, and experiences are reconducted to a unique narration. For this purpose, the state-of-the-art artistic production becomes the foundation for a new sensible knowledge of the museum (museological aesthetics), essentially built on the performative side of a renewed synesthetic dialogue between antiques and contemporary, where the dramatization of the relation has a central role.
In such hard times filled with uncertainties, the Civic Museums of Palazzo Buonaccorsi wish to investigate the future with hope and foresight, pushing for analytic mentality, critical spirit, creativity, and innovation. Overcoming the challenges of our times means not only to start over with renovated diligence in the fulfilment of the museum essential functions, but also to support the development of the contemporariness, identify and test original codes, and refine unusual paths, regenerating the connection with the public and the community.
With such spirit, the institution from Macerata welcomed the artistic project The Flying Dutchman by Fabrizio Cotognini. A project thought and realized to revaluate the relationship between contemporary art and museum spaces in terms of participation and connection, to destroy and cross the borders between categories, species, disciplines, and languages; the project aims to create “new lines of vision”, according to which the work is not only a “product” but an experience that “textualizes spaces and spatializes discourses”.
With the usual expositive manners, the installation inspired by the “Flying Dutchman” triggers a short circuit whose aim is to “reimagine the museum as an active, historical agent” which speaks “of creative questioning and dissent” . The result is a new narration, real or mental, generated in the dissemination and proximity of works belonging to different imaginative paths and contexts.
The research of the artist rapidly spreads over space, emerges from the surface of the representation, and even takes possession of the “frame”. It advances and incorporates the traditional expositive tools: the display cabinets become art forms themselves, both in the fluctuating representation of the ghost ships and in their mirroring the late Baroque fanfares of the majestic “Galleria dell’Eneide”, where the vision standing between the eye and the object becomes meta-representation [catalog.]. Setting his drawings in the permanent collection Cotognini builds a refined and emotional scenic installation and opens the curtains for the theme of his inspiration [catalog.]. He also transforms the great loggia in a gigantic marine space from whose water the captain-visitor re-emerges redeemed. For this purpose, Cotognini “hires a crew” of art’s masters, summoned to translate his visions into narrative objects, and it is precisely in this craftmanship that lie the roots of his creative will, supported not only by the experience but also by the cultural education acquired.
If The Flying Dutchman by Cotognini seems to activate a system of complex references, the museum space becomes “the essential matter and substance of the installation […] The one between the exhibition context and the installation is an unbreakable relationship that, apart from the critical aspects that it proposes, both from the point of view of the revival of the work and its preservation, is really the crux of every reflection”. Here time seems to be beaten by a diapason which endlessly proceeds towards an extended module, suggests new poetical starting points, and measures and filters the intensity of light and colour, into which flow the meanings and times carried by the single element composing the work.
The heterogenous archaeological imagery of the artist is displayed in these spatial-temporal stratifications, even with changeable tendencies and variable shapes; an imagery populated by characters drawn from history, animal shapes and vegetal elements stolen from nature [catalog.]. From this point of view the artist is a dismantler of cultural traces and perceptive conditionings, operating on them with his geniality.
Cotognini acts in this way on the sequence of 12 ancient miniatures, revitalised and prepared as in a laic retablo made of observers and observed. The portraits blend with the highly imaginative glossary of the artist and reveal the tracks of his thought transformed by coloured glasses in a chromatic scale ranging from yellow to blue [catalog.].
He seeds on a fertile ground, germinating new visions and exhibiting articulations from the meeting of artistic tendencies from different epochs. The intention of the artist is not to celebrate new art tendencies, but to establish a more dynamic relationship with the viewer, on account of new conceptual schemes methodically optimized and linked with each other.
Driven by an alienating analysis, Cotognini simply had to break the established barriers between different art forms and blend, or at least approach, their theorical definition, reproposing un-structured manipulated and actualized incisions or antique miniatures [catalog.].
In the meticulous preparing path, the artist adds also the work by Osvaldo Licini, bought by the municipality in 1966, and puts it in dialogue with his interpretation of “the Flying Dutchman” [catalog]. The work of Licini, known as “Luna che si specchia”, “Paesaggio 2” or “Personaggio 2”, and “Amalassunta”, displays a hilly landscape surrounded by a night sky of cobalt blue and enlightened by a large celestial body reminding the moon. Inside the work a pair of letters stands out as an extension of a white bright wake. The reminder to the Licinian interpretation of “the Flying Dutchman” shows the aspiration to transcend itself and reach the heart of the creation [catalog.].
The constant comparison with evidences from the past activates in the artist the awareness of the importance of materials, executive proficiency, and the attention to the expositive modalities. His work is the complex result of a thought ranging from sociology to philosophy, from history to contemporary and classical art. It is also an accurate know-how that emerges in the will to englobe the artisan expertise in his implants.
Cotognini freely stimulates technique and materials to the needs of a deep spiritual vision and each of his work or drawing becomes an embracing and passional field of psychological, expressive, and relational forces. “The Flying Dutchman” is a luring myth that suggests reflections, hanging between fantasy and creative inspiration, and stirs the imagination of many artists in the production of various contents. This legend inspired painters and sculpturers, novelists and musicians; also, the comic world, the television, sport, and video games have been captured by its suggestive and fascinating demiurgic seduction. “The Flying Dutchman” by Cotognini is a fable in the fable, a collection in a collection in which echoes the source of his creative instinct; namely, thoughts, emotions, and feelings. In each work the typical traces of his reflections emerge and raise anchor, reflect themselves and land to new creative impulses whose shapes stand between eternal and earthly time, between illusions and reality, between storm and peace. The protagonist is the human being who, with his\her sensibility and talent, could hear and translate the vibration of the matter, sublimate and transfer them to the extra-sensorial world where they cannot be removed because they became an absolute entity; namely, the thought. Exercise, study, sensibility, intuitive abilities, in addition to deep analysis and synthetic capacities propose the image of an artist travelling on the polysemic trails of the communication, able to involve the viewer-reader in a stimulating process of critical and interpretative decoding.
The exhibition staged at Palazzo Buonaccorsi, where the myth is legend, could not find a more suitable space of vision to reconnect tradition and modernity, image and imagination.