Reviews

Little spirits

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

Onieiric Realism

With her reliefs, Alessandra Cocchi poetically conveys the secret outline of a dream-like language that is articulated in intimate graphemes which, re-emerging from textured-paper subconscious, unveil themselves in all their "lightness": a lightness that is undoubtedly associated with an unquestionable precision and determination of creativity. The paper used by the artist is thus not banal support, but primary substance: live material-color rendered fertile by a wisely captured light to show us the infinite and refined expressive possibilities of one of the most common materials in our daily lives. But we should also say these are works to listen to, as well as to look at: they are born, almost imperceptibly, out of the silence of paper-space, to transform themselves into the "neumatic-signs" of an intimate song of the soul.

Johnny Farabegoli

Sculpture

Alessandra Cocchi's works are of an unexpected lightness; not only because they seem to be made out of time-worn metal but instead are made of paper, manipulated and enameled paper, paper vitrified with an original and exquisite procedure; but most of all because they are perforated, almost as if permeated by air and to the point of being confused with the atmosphere. It is not by chance that the artist loves and pursues Italo Calvino's inventions in the "Invisible cities". Their same color, a non-uniform glimmer of unexpressed dawn (since the artist is figurative elsewhere), leads toward this subtle metamorphosis. And yet in spite of this, the orthogonal joints of Alessandra Cocchi's pieces of sculpture make them conquer the space, so that they can be observed from any vantage point, with surprise and discovery. This is why by integrating themselves and/or dominating, they become a metaphor for existence, and specifically for the presence of artists in contemporary society, in which they lightly and fluidly place themselves inside things ["Geometrie fluide" is Alessandra Cocchi's trademark], to be able to interpret them in a logical, yet imaginative way.

Elisabetta Ricca Rosellini

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