Drama and works by Alessandro Di Cola

Claudio Crescentini

As in the frames of a Brit-movie of several years ago, the works of Alessandro Di Cola Seem to visualize the torment (the ecstasy?) of a mental and creative process that brushes the natural drama, to use cinema jargon and in our opinion, already present in the artist’s noticeable stylistic independence ultimately probes the deepest eidetic needs, searching for Man’s essence.
Di Cola, in fact, through continuous experimentation with different materials such as bronze, wax aluminium, wood, resin etc. seems to want to reflect its history/story beyond the forms and directly onto man and thus onto culture and thus onto art, starting from verifiable post-surrealist and new-dada roots before touching on the compositional problems of the conceptual art of the second half of the 20th century and the wave of the new-sculpture of this same period.
From Mona Hatoum to David Smith. We can see, for example, in the case of Journey, where Alessandro Di Cola stages the drama, with “heartrending” spirals and webs that emerge from within the same used suitcase, and which, in turn, become the hub as well as the limit of the scene itself. Similarly, as in other works by Di Cola, the vibrations of the material eventually give rise, as expressed by Fabrizia Ranelletti to visual “tormented dramaturgies” where you can retrieve and validate a new “moral art” and the values within. Referring back to Journey, the artist writes: “Water, like blood that bathes the world and preserves life. “Seas like layers of distribution, vessels of stories/histories and secrets.
During his journey, he restores his strength by washing his own clothes which carry its ”stains”, “smells” and colours. A journey that has marked beginnings known to all of us” in just one the word, Di Cola seems to want to push his art to the so-called “Expression of the spirit”, or better, the human being’s “conditions of existence” where technical and intellectual media ultimately become indispensable to the artist thus, making up for those instinctual shortages still partially present in several of his works. Take, for example the series featuring Clowns which does not totally guarantee that achievement of harmony between body and nature experienced by every artist during every act of life and art. But beyond this, Di Cola remains a wonderfully curious visual artist, as in his picto-photographs where a great love of manual works in his art always predominates. And here we can see the determining influence of his teacher at the Academy, Bruno Liberatore who imparted the concept of using the hands to works the material as well as that of Giuseppe Mannino in descriptive and sculptural terms. Di Cola is above all, however, a pure creative instinct, with one eye, as already observed, on the material and the other focusing towards the outer part of art, the nature of which as the artist himself states needs to be interpreted “as a universal language of forms and a generator of ideas. ” These, ultimately, are the qualities expressed by the young artist in his creations, experienced as, again, personal real-life drama and experiences which are subjective but inevitably tending towards objective, and so belonging to all who aspire to the universal.
Thus one breathes a continual torment in his works - a noticeable characteristic in many works by contemporary young artists - and which ultimately pervades all his artistic and intellectual search, so as to coincide precisely with the precision of figural response of his creations. It is precisely his thoughts on art forms which eventually become the aim of his art but which, nonetheless, should not be confused with the end or rather the heterodoxy of cyclical time, but seen as reaching his goal through the techniques, art included, which pushes constantly and exasperatingly towards the future as expressed in the work her/she. She: the beating of wings? She: a wild mane? She: an image-icon? You: graphic linearity of Sumi-e. The identifying process of this work’s visual reality seems to be deliberately inconstant, so that the only way to escape the cruel game of interpretation, is “lose” oneself in the arcane scrolls of translucent bronze, where, as the writer himself describes his work, “even the coldest surface is warmed up by an invisible energy that makes it alive. ” This reference is seen again in the skilful use of new artistic techniques, attested by Di Cola starting from sculptural heterodoxy to more modern photographic techniques –(picto) photographs – castrated by the brush stroke which, in the artist’s words, (and even writing about it seems a suitable creative-intellectual provocation) memory is found and resurfaces, the story/history of every human being, in the stories of every life, with its presence, its two-color essence, but with the nuances of an infinity that has been granted to us. ”

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