GIANLUCA COSCI

Old Masters

Throughout my career I have always been interested in the concept of censorship in both a metaphorical and literal sense, and this idea has often permeated my work in many ways.

In my art practice I have used (among other things) found paintings on which I make various interventions and alterations. Through the pictorial intervention on the found work I try to establish a dialectical, albeit asymmetrical, relationship with it. The found painting thus becomes a palimpsest or forced partner that is both ‘saved’ and ‘sacrificed’ in equal measure. Ultimately, I am interested in using ‘real’ found paintings rather than their photographic reproductions, as the intervention must always be on the physical skin of the found artwork precisely to question, challenge, and subvert it in a deeper sense.

With its questions about the notion of image concealment and visual negation, my work could stimulate debates regarding the meaning of creativity and its opposite: exploring how the concept of destruction and the negative approach to the object/palimpsest can be reversed in a possible affirmative creation and intervention: iconoclasm, then, should be understood as a method of unveiling processes of ‘creative friction’.

The act of covering the surface of an old painting with a layer of paint except for a few elements can create new focal points to the parts that remain visible. The vision is thus always partial, blurred or limited. The visual hierarchy is thus completely reversed by preventing the view of specific areas of the image, subverting the original intention of what is worthy of our attention, what is blocked, highlighted or hidden.