I NUDI
“… Women who have time and desire to love ….
” this is a phrase by Rodin to which our artist is very attached, so much so that in 1999 at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, Cinzia Cotellessa, inaugurated an exhibition with the aforementioned phrase: an exhibition basically consisting of portraits of women of all ages and ethnicities , naked and not …
Daniela Romano wrote about her:
“… stories, stories, stories … all we do is tell stories! Cinzia Cotellessa tells us about her: her hypsism, her need to survive, more than right. She works like a panther to reach this subjectivity, with a formal speech to the interlocutor, mediated by grace patience, and full of (chromatic) nuances and expectations.
Stories of woman who calibrate her interactivity with a message transmitted and contained by a tip of sanguine on a white sheet … on paper. The information is subtle and persuasive in attracting the unfortunate in this feminist world disguised as a reporter of her time, although full of historical consciousness and driven to lead us back into us … “. It seems strange observing the works of the Cotellessa to be able to affirm that it is traceable in her work almost a path in reverse. We usually admire abstract paintings painted by artists who started their research from the figurative, here the author clearly indicates us how her new stylistic landing starts from hidden geometric shapes.
Attracted and enchanted by the perfection, corporeity and plasticity of the sphere, she offers us opulent nudes, overflowing with sensuality in which she manages to sublimate these geometric shapes, chaining them towards each other.
In these mixed techniques with her natively exuberant, irrational temperament, she makes us discover the sensuality hidden in a foot, an ambiguous foot, not of a man, not of a woman, but nervous and vibrant, because her nudes are imposed almost violently, they are verses slammed in the face, which contrast, immersed in a sweet suspension, with the environment that surrounds them full of curtains, drapes, tassels, hair, ties, twines that lead us ineluctably to the inner torments experienced however with seraphic simplicity as if staying strongly in contact with reality and matter could somehow make the journey easier.
The wise use of sanguine has been combined with the use of pasty, warm colors, rotten green, undergrowth green on which in one way or another the figure is placed as we lie on the depth of our unconscious, the gold, baroque index of wealth and pleasure of life.
Thus we come to “Zut”, literally “damn!”, an exclamation that forces us to hold our breath and stay suspended for a moment, that moment dear to our artist that we already found in her first nudes curled up in an immovable effort. It is the suspended, infinite moment, in which the metamorphosis of color and form takes place.
The bodies, these naked, abundant bodies, which brazenly propose themselves from our gaze at the same time, which allow us to guess that there is something else to see and discover to stimulate the observer’s curiosity and wit.
With her creative sense, the artist combines memory and linguistic style, experimentation and representation, ornamentation and communication, collective poetry of art and personal prose of the matter. Her anger of a woman who wants to communicate with her femininity and in doing so she remains faithful to the words of d’Annunzio: “… adhesion to life to create and distinguish, to expand, to dissolve and renew oneself…”