pencil, ink, biacca, acrilic on Fabio Mauri Artist Book - 25 x 38,5 cm each, courtesy of Anibal Jozami collection, Buenos Aires

Fabrizio Cotognini’s work is nourished by images, intricacies, marks, and words. These elements, engaged as they are in a continuous and dense dialogue among themselves, produce in each work a short-circuit leading to further new images, contents, and visual and conceptual possibilities. Time and history are the necessary sources of his art: like a timetraveller Cotognini manoeuvres among moments, temperatures, symbols, and metaphors of both the present and the past. A collectors and enthusiastic scholar of artist’s books, for Flags he decided to concentrate on the prized pages of Manipolazione di Culture, a work by Fabio Mauri begun in 1971, and collected together in a book published by Nuova Foglio, Macerata, in January 1976. The original work analyzes the relationship between power and images through the use of photographs, texts, and monochrome black areas. Cotognini acts on this structure and, on the one hand, enlarges Mauri’s use of “subtraction” in the dark parts and, on the other, exponentially increases visual variables. The result is a large map in which we lose ourselves by following, in our attempt to understand, the infinite contaminations between communications, language, politics, and images.