Puffy clouds of dreams and soft pillows
The criticism
Donatella Ferretti
The world through Ivo's eyes. A world in which everyday objects appear as if transfigured, illuminated by the absolutely joyful and divergent gaze of this young and eclectic artist, revisited and shaped into powerfully vital representations.
In this series of works...Read more
SOFT PAINTIGS
Donatella ferretti
The world through Ivo's eyes. A world in which everyday objects appear as if transfigured, illuminated by the absolutely joyful and divergent gaze of this young and eclectic artist, revisited and shaped into powerfully vital representations.
In this series of works conceived from a precious material deeply rooted in the history of his city, Ascoli Piceno, Ivo Cotani seems to evoke dreamlike, almost childlike images in their chromatic immediacy. Imaginative and colorful animals, clouds swollen with dreams and soft pillows for a child sleeping under the stars thus spring up.
In this way, thanks to the extraordinary creative flair of Ivo Cotani, the butterfly born from that cocoon that produced the precious yarn, belying its fate that would condemn it to a short life, will instead continue to hover in the air, drawing fantastic worlds where the possible meets the desirable.
Ivo's world, indeed.
Sabrina Pecci
There is a path backward that Ivo Cotani, visual artist and performer, traces: a line that plows through personal memories and shared memories, rediscovered in listening to stories and anecdotes about his hometown, Ascoli Piceno. Through casual narratives, unexpected encounters, and purposeful explorations, the artist re-discovered origins and traditions related to Piceno silkworm farming, a flourishing industry in the early part of the 20th century, activating his own design from the chromatic suggestions triggered by the research: yellow, which characterized the particular quality of the Piceno cocoons; red, in bands, which signaled the silkworms; the white of blackberries; the colors of fabrics and textiles linked to childhood memories, to other tales, to colors scents shapes intimately known but with elusive meaning, aspects steeped in the fabric of the city and in some remote corner of his mind. Familiar memories, of games (was it a game?) with cocoons, mulberry blackberries, or perhaps tales, of older and younger women (is it a memory? are they tales?) raising silkworms, from whose yarn the finest silk was made. Silk that Ivo Cotani recovers and contaminates with painting and signs, in a layered and three-dimensional composition sewn with threads as if they were traces of memories, around elementary and soft forms, overlaps of old fabrics sought in flea markets or otherwise in disuse. Stitching - which evokes countless examples in the art world and refers to the vast field of textile art - here does not become writing but remains as a minimal, poor, simple sign, far from the complexity of embroidery and is for Ivo unambiguously the authentic link that connects him to the imaginative world of childhood, albeit transfigured by the layers of memory. Childhood as a joyful world, now in soft, pastel colors, now in chromatic and always vivid explosions of silky sheen. Joyfulness that preludes and shows an inverse destiny to that of the caterpillar imprisoned in/on its cocoon and that reveals the transformation taking place in a being that hovers/freezes in a two-dimensional, fairy-tale space: always present the wings, the lightness but also the will to escape, travel, openness, a recurring visual element in Cotani's painting, as well as the irreverent angel, the stars, the hybrid figures of strange and fabulous animals.