The installation has been conceived and created specifically for the gallery and features a selection of previously unseen works focused on the theme of emptiness as the foundational element of visible and invisible reality.
Cossignani’s works are the result of cerebral and visual layering, a careful observation beyond the content that values the “discards,” the state of emptiness that remains beyond the brushstrokes and reveals forms, faces, bodies. The gaze gets lost traveling through different dimensions and entering the depth of the image that opens worlds and reflections, becoming manifold, fluid, and undefined. Interpretations overlap and speak to the viewer’s most intimate and personal side.
“The project stems from an evolution of work I’ve been pursuing for some years,I had an obsession with the non-visible part and began developing a series of reflections on the theme of emptiness, finding parallels in science that confirm how not only the origin of everything came from a state of emptiness, from zero, but that emptiness itself has its own substance.
Years ago, while creating some set designs for a short film, I was working with all these paper cutouts, and I realized that the discards spoke more than the subject I derived from them; these empty shapes allowed for free interpretation, becoming substance themselves. Emptiness doesn’t represent a counterpart to fullness but rather one constitutes the other. I found myself applying this approach to my life, contemplating the imperceptible, the myopic background, and going beyond reality as appearance. Emptiness is the dominant characteristic with which I construct the work, the substance in which the forms of my feeling are immersed.” Carlo Cossignani.
The exhibition path presents a continuous narrative, a fluctuation through the material impressed by the lightness of watercolor, an apparently fragile expression that conceals an endogenous strength that alludes to classic pictorial concepts and transcends them in organic and dreamlike forms that brush against the figures of artificial intelligence. The mirrored steel sculptures, cold and sharp, resemble Arab-Norman architecture, they claim a part of space but without foundations and ties to the earth, like suspended kites, they are alien and impossible structures whose function is denied, emptied.
It reveals a precarious dualism where paper, a delicate material, confronts the sharp silhouettes of steel and expresses the original structure of our universe made up of different states of stability. It is in this fragile balance between aggregation and disintegration, between one state and another, that the artist accesses that dimension of perceived reality, where subjects strip themselves of all resistance, allowing themselves to be shaped by imperceptible presences, making them complete, where appearance gives way to resemblance and the time of contemplation induces profound questions.
Carlo Cossignani’s work challenges the ephemeral contemporaneity of our digital world. In an age where everything seems to be immediate and fleeting, where information flows quickly and superficially, the decision to dedicate an exhibition to Cossignani’s art is an act of resistance to haste and transience. The choice to focus on the work of this eclectic artist is motivated by the deep conviction that art should not be consumed in an instant but should be savored, contemplated, and interpreted calmly. Cossignani’s works force us to abandon the frenetic pace of our daily lives and immerse ourselves in a world of layers and complexity. This exhibition represents the opportunity to escape the frenzy of the modern world and immerse ourselves in an artistic universe where time takes on a different dimension.
Elisa Bonzano, art director Tempesta Gallery
For more information, please visit https://www.tempestagallery.com/.
