ULTRA MALE
The body as a device of possibilities
WHERE:
WHEN:
Ascoli Piceno, Italy
May, 2025
The exhibition’s title is a semantic trap, a conceptual game oscillating between the “ultra male” and “beyond evil.”
Critical text by Valerio Schito
In ULTRA MALE, Cotani stages a silent and sensual revolution of the body and its representation. Far from asserting an identity, his work dismantles its very foundations: the pieces—ranging from works on paper to paintings and modular sculptures—do not tell us what a body is, but rather evoke its transitory, open, and imaginary nature.
The works on paper—fragile, transparent, almost like prayers—are the visual heart of the exhibition. In the drawings, the line is essential, childlike, sharp: light figures that smile and bend, bodies that reveal nipples like flowers, red phalluses as joyful, sensual, and surreal emblems. Cotani does not illustrate, he alludes. He does not construct a message to interpret, but a ritual to cross. Each figure is an identity dissolving gracefully, a laughing doubt.
Alongside these evanescent presences, his sculptures offer a tactile and transformable counterpoint. Dismantlable, modular, mutant, they appear as true devices of freedom: phalluses, breasts, arms, heads become interchangeable elements in an organism that rejects norms and embraces heterogeneity. It is the gesture of the surgeon meeting that of the child: anatomy as symbolic play, as the possibility of redesigning oneself. The statue becomes an organism, a living object that accepts the intervention of the other, mutating along with the gaze.
ULTRA MALE does not thematize gender: it traverses it, breaks it, re-dreams it. We are not facing a social denunciation, but a poetic operation acting on a deeper level: that of ritual, of vision, of the body playing at being without ever needing to explain what. It is an altar—not to identity, but to its dissolution as a creative act.
To enter this exhibition is to step into a terrain of metamorphosis. Here, the spectator may be both viewer and author, witness and sculptor. Ambiguity is a gift, not a threat. And every possible configuration—from the erotic chimera to the imperfect god—becomes a celebration of the freedom not to choose. With gentleness and subversion, Ivo Cotani asks us to unlearn the body as a finished fact. And he accompanies us on a journey in which art becomes a laboratory of transformation, a collective breath, a disorienting and necessary rite.