Ivo Cotani's works, as the title of the exhibition also indicates, are maps, then scale representations of places: but they are maps oriented by the body and its physical perceptions. The body is the absolute protagonist of these works, ubiquitous and pervasive, with more or less explicit faces, arms, hands, fingers, sexual organs; stylized or substantial bodies, erect or stretched, compact or dismembered. It is the body, with its perceptual apparatus, that determines the vision of the world, and in this Ivo Cotani's art is very phenomenological: it focuses on the perception of one's own body, and in fact in some cases it seems to be looking at x-rays; and on the perception of the external world, and then we see skies, stars, landscapes, ears of corn. But the body, as a mediating element, is always inescapable. In one of the most interesting works in the exhibition, the body is a large eye with frayed contours that gives a glimpse of an inner world but looks "beyond."

The style moves between modern and pop and at times we seem to see an Andy Warhol with elements of Rousseau the Dogman: large, disproportionate, naive animals silhouetted against bright colors like yellow and orange in highlighter mode. The reference to the world of advertising is evident not only in the compositional process-with the shift from digital printing to painting-but also and above all in the scenic effect, and it will be interesting to see the four largest canvases "suspended" in the center of the Cola dell'Amatrice room, with a possible "Times Square" effect that is truly disruptive.

The bright chromatics are a relevant feature. The painting is not marked by lines, it is not "marked," but proceeds by color fields that are partly geometric (digital) and partly free and shaded (pictorial).

The forms are heterogeneous because the abstract dimension is always alternated and combined with the figurative dimension, but certainly human and nonetheless animal forms are appreciated: the coexistence of humanity and animality seems to be the result of a fascination with Egyptian art, which, after all, has greatly inspired modern and contemporary art. Of the four large works, one is inspired by man in a riot of sexual organs, stars, eyes, moons, suns; one is inspired by the bird, with the large eye observing inside it but also the world (didn't the eye also obsess Dali and Buñuel in their early surrealist works?); the third is inspired by the dragon, and here we enter an interesting mythical dimension; the fourth is inspired by the tiger, a tiger that in the canvas is halved, partly hidden by a tall ear of corn. Beyond humanity and animality, we can perhaps speak more generally of "forms of nature," of "art of nature."  

Finally, the focus on the sacred is noteworthy. The sacred is present not only in the mythological dimension (the Mother Goddess, the satyrs) but also in the more properly Catholic one, and this is a very surprising element. The nativity is revisited in a modern language that is disorienting, not least because Christ's body looks more like that of a deposition than that of a birth. And the Last Supper is còlected in its final phase, when everyone is gone and only animals are left to consume the leftovers. It is a desecrating reading that recalls certain surrealist depictions of Buñuel (such as the finale of Viridiana).

In all of Ivo Cotani's works there emerges a sense of research that moves among maps, bodies, places, perception, the sacred. A search that also invests the most material aspects of his own artistic production. So that immersed among colors, forms and spaces the observer is not only pleasantly impressed, but is induced above all to reflect.