Mimmo Cozzolino

MOMENTS artist statement

MIMMO COZZOLINO AT TACIT GALLERIES, 30 OCT–24 NOV 2019

My image making interests include photography, drawing (traditional and digital) and painting. Inspired by surrealism, I often employ chance and random actions in my image making. I particularly admire the philosophy of John Cage and this composer’s predilection for chance to guide creative output.

The ‘Moments’ series is painted in mixed media on used X‑rays film. My curiosity about X‑rays as a substrate to adopt started after my parents passed away and I helped clear their house. I found dozens of envelopes full of X‑rays which I took back to the studio. Initially I used the X‑rays to hand-cut stencils which were then used for painting on canvas. Eventually I began painting directly on the used X‑rays film and liking the effect of leaving small areas of unpainted film for contrast.

The element of visual surprise that my process can, and often does produce, is what motivates me to keep creating: I want to be inspired by the images that come to the surface by chance and almost autonomously. They generally suggest other visual paths to explore. Only later do I try to imagine the meaning these images may offer, yet some images puzzle me completely, and I like this too. mc

MOMENTS by Joe Pascoe

Stencils and X-rays are forms of memory. In these artworks by Mimmo Cozzolino, time shifts backwards and forwards between recollection and inspiration. The visual conversation that emerges is both intimate and profound. The artist is seen working through embedded emotions and neuro-narratives, as a metaphor for life itself.

Cozzolino has used old X-ray film, gathered mainly from his deceased parents’ home, as the basis for these works. He has then used stencils to guide his act of painting. As we know, X-rays are taken by anonymous devices that project electromagnetic wavelengths, which are captured on life-size film, to examine bones or soft tissue. The stencils also have a structural quality. In bringing these elements together, with paint, Mimmo Cozzolino has created an extraordinary exhibition.

The stencils are made by the artist using found and hand-crafted shapes. This approach allows a calligraphy to surface. Bones and relics are often seen as signs of past miracles. Here the magic is contemporary. Biomorphic on at least two levels – stencil and X-ray – Cozzolino adds a third by his own actions.

Carl Yung liked to find the big symbols in people’s dreams, laying them out as a personal landscape.  Sigmund Freud sought out the defining scenarios that reoccur within such psychological mindscapes. As viewers of this emotional exhibition, we are caught mid-stream in the artist’s dreaming.

We seem to be present in the moment before waking, when clarity threatens as a powerful revelation. We are very deep somewhere. Where? I think we are witness to a set of flourishing moments, exotic artworks blooming in the moonlight.

Surrealism as an art movement allowed artists to harvest their own souls. For a child born in post-war Italy, to go on to discover amazing Australian design symbols, was special in itself. Mimmo Cozzolino always brought a poetic vision to his daily studio work. Space and wit were always part of his approach.

By starting on a black base of X-rays, Cozzolino has very literally referenced his own origins. His ‘start’ commences with desire to create, a Freudian driver that sits alongside the need for water and breathing. Perhaps the paint is the water and the stencils represent the breath. It doesn’t matter. His use of personalised templates is a way of reusing favoured shapes. Colour is brushed on with vertical dabs and sideways swishes, to render the picture plane as an abstracted storyboard. This is artmaking that recognises the ambiguity of discovery, resulting in talisman paintings.

He travels in his mind, obeying an inner voice, seeking risks. We journey with him but only in retrospect. Variously we go into a jungle or into the folds of a subtle conversation, never sure, but always guided by an artist working toward a truth. There can be movement or monumental stasis. Left, right, up or down, we are taken around. An image may emerge omen-like as a key to perceiving the work as ‘finished’.

A tree grows, a bird sings, a heart beats, all within a moment. The Buddhist knows to be modest though becomes empowered within the moment, thus finding a further paradox. Such is the nature of the truth within Mimmo Cozzolino’s art. Titling a work as ‘COZZOLINO Chiara Mrs’, Mimmo acknowledges his mother as part of his cycle of life. To remember is to live again.

Remember a time in your past when an image just appeared. Perhaps when you were young and you opened a library book and saw a picture of the Amazon River. Much as a dark room once promised the hallucination of a photographer’s chemical craft, Mimmo Cozzolino seeks to deliver an apparition. This is art making from the inside out. A key device is activating positive and negative psychological spaces, see-sawing in the playground of the artist’s mind. Or swing around a maypole until giddy. Caught in the carnival’s hall of mirrors, only Mimmo’s magic can get you out.

Amulet beguiles with its rich colours and centralised form, floating before you as a spell. So many of these pieces such as Songs and Homage to Sarah, function as dense pools of colour and beautiful space. These abstract values reveal Mimmo Cozzolino’s destination as the divine nature of beauty itself, in reflection of such Ancient Greek philosophers as Socrates.

To quote the artist,

I want to be inspired by the images that come to the surface by chance almost autonomously. They generally suggest other visual paths to explore. Only later do I try to imagine the meaning these images may offer, yet some images puzzle me completely, and I like this too.

In reading Cozzolino’s artworks we should not only ask what do we see, but why? The static aspect of visual art has been changed by the digital era. Notions of scale and content have been challenged by screen culture – everything happens all the time. The manufacture of visual art now includes hybrids and ‘tribrids’, and forever on, of which Cozzolino’s pieces make a comment. There is a subversion in play as his support medium is semi-historical X-ray film. The development of an unusual way of creating art is Cozzolino’s choice, his own way of dealing with his own moment in time.

Like the found photographs he adores, the question of meaning rises as a continuing human concern. These artworks are so very beautiful and yet so strange, they came from the mind of a gifted young boy from Herculaneum, who never forgot how he felt when first he saw Australia, whilst holding his father’s hand. Look Papa! They did.

Joe Pascoe, October 2019

Joe Pascoe is an Australian poet whose latest book Gum Tree Burning is available from Reading Sideways Press.