Italy

Cosimo Andrisano

From the sixties until the end of the twentieth century, many artistic movements and groups followed one another, sometimes in striking contrast. New languages were tried out. Some of them had clear social intentions, others avoided any form of communication. Cosimo Andrisano`s works usually suggest the night raids of young people equipped with sprays - the writers, whose origins are rooted in American underground culture. On the national artistic scene of the beginning of the millennium his work is a continuation and a synthesis of those poetic and sociological needs, which express both disenchantment and hope. The stratified paintings by this artist, who is so interested in the mood of our metropolis, depict a multiform reality. With his sensational constructions, which mix different techniques, from collage to painting, from inscription to support stratification, Andrisano codifies the dreams of escape and celebrity of the latest generation and mixes them with advertising slogans, pictures, scratches, red flashes and postmodern hieroglyphics. A position which reflects the traditional critical role of most collage and décollage as an artistic denunciation technique. Andrisano conducts a complex investigation into identity, identification and the generation gap. To put forward the qualities with which he sets out his poetics the artist recovers the wall not as a thing but as an idea, and builds nearly totemic wall effigies which can be leant against a wall or even stand alone. The artist from Mesagne takes to OPEN 12 an installation of great impact, which sums up his recent years’ labours. The whole work of art develops on a surface of four square metres and a height of nearly three metres; the materials used, that is wood, ceramic, resins, recycled posters, glass and iron, supply lots of information about our world. “The choice of materials”, says the artist , “intends to express a link among sculpture, architecture and design”. A wall is a white screen where you can project a logo, a dream, a protest. And if usually in Andrisano’s pictures letters stand for the stealthy, sometimes painful, passing by of ordinary boys who live in a megalopolis, the masonry created for Venice Lido contains something more. It reproduces traces of everybody’s life, symbols which pass before our eyes through television, newspapers and advertising posters. Andrisano suggests a miniature town which in time has grown richer in signs and has wondered about its own role. What are walls in our world, which aims at standardizing us in a sweetened future with no objections? Are they separating places, mental fences or protective enclosures? Andrisano says: “They are signs of our past-present-future”. And they reach towards the sky to prove an ancient need of eternity which today has been reduced to a poor dream of possession.

Text by Anna Caterina Bellati