"Look around you, can you see?"
Fabrizio Cotognini


T. + 39 02 26924450 e-mail:


May 6 > 24, 2020
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The man who looks at nature as a spectator is wrong, trying to study its laws in order to exploit it,
tear it to pieces and try to recompose it in an artificial synthesis. In a historical moment full of
questions, in which everything is both relevant and irrelevant at the same time and the social
dimension has radically changed, Fabrizio Cotognini's exhibition draws a window from which to
admire a panorama that takes on the contours of a terrain suspended between physical and
mental perception. Similar to a state of awake sleep in which real elements, desires and
imagination are mixed, Look around you, can you see? is articulated around characters like Faust
and Darwin, becoming a place where time has no purpose but is included and understood. Time
was a dear theme to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who made it the cornerstone of his famous
melodramatic poem, Faust, which Cotognini took up again to conceive drawings, sculptures and
notes in which temporal anxiety meanders through the figures of Mephistopheles and Margaret,
resonating more topical than ever. Furthermore, it is precisely by looking that the enigma of
meaning radiates, which triggers the attempt to fix one's existence in time, which can take any
form. In the mythological protagonists we recognize the connotations of a collective aesthetic
expression where it is possible to find their identity reflected. It is after all a very ancient human trait
the lust for rest from the storms of life, but today we are all more aware, like perhaps the old sailor,
that the knowledge that gives the illusion of omnipotence is inadequate. In his attempts to move by
himself the limits, now evident, of the human dimension, man is destined to submit to the power of
nature, irrational, fascinating and sometimes destructive, so Cotognini has worked on distances
and proximity not only as a common practice of space and time, but as a real way of seeing,
meaning by seeing the apparatus of the senses and memory combined with a subjective and
mobile presence in the world. By rearranging ancient engravings, intervening on illustrious
architectural projects, searching for that contemporary key that is not a simple mise en scène but a
real involvement of the spectator within ever new sequences, we let stories, emotions and
experiences flow from the works on display that indicate the need for an extended look that
embraces the plurality of our time in our space that, inevitably, cannot but be conceived as infinite,
one and indivisible.
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Fabrizio Cotognini |
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