Reliefs

These works reflect a special moment in the course of Alessandra Cocchi's continuous experimentation. Here the artist feels the need to deal with the absolute values of existence. This time a free and light spirit's play and dimension are present, but in a lesser tone. Almost as if one wanted to dig into the abyss of one's soul in search of ontological meaning, the attention focuses on the sign and the color disappears. These are primordial signs with great expression but also tempered by a controlled compositional rhythm, by an elaboration that is at once calculated and instinctive, the result of a mature reflection about the experience of modern art. It is not easy to define these apparently simple works in which paper, an ancient support, is taken beyond its natural limits to become relief, volume that generates forms in space. The space seems to be the subtle, squared and pure one of abstraction, but the sign's impetus evokes ancient, ritualistic and expressive gestures, suspended halfway between a rupestral, primordial graffito and a tea ceremony. The tension emerges from having sensed these apparently irreconcilable, potentially destructive opposites, and dominating them with art.

Alberto Severi

Alessandra Cocchi proves that the most fragile of materials can take on a palpable physicality under the weight of the simpletest symbols, in her exquisitely spare white-on-white work in embossed paper, "la casa dei ritorni", which has the ethereal swiftness of a Zen painting executed in invisible ink.

Ed Mc Cormack 2009