Senza titolo

After years of training in Rome, Paris and London, where he taught at the Chelsea
College of Arts and worked on stage productions, Cotani focused as from the early
1970s, in close contact with the American avant-garde during stays in the USA,
on reducing painting to the “zero degree”. His analysis of painting is of a metalinguistic
and conceptual character with attention focused on syntactic tools such as
surface, colour, light and support. By “painting” he means not only the act of
painting but its combination with thought and knowledge as theorized by the Greeks.
The two large canvases, painted in monochromatic expanses and deftly juxtaposed,
create a perceptual interplay of solids and voids that recalls American Minimalism. Cotani seeks to allude to a wholly intellectual reality of form in space that he conceives
in terms of content rather than architecture and examines with reference to
its principles of construction. (Transl. by Paul Metcalfe per Scriptum, Roma)