Other than itself

Kou Gallery presents “Other than Self,” a solo exhibition by Niccolò Fornari, on the occasion of which it was decided to focus on a series of works that interweave pictorial and textual production, the result of an expressive research with a strongly introspective character that the artist has been pursuing since 2019.

Inside the gallery is a journey into the meanderings of Fornari's mind, through the artist's thoughts and moods, which reveal his most intimate psychological oscillations.

The realization of the works stems from a process of intense identification: the artist engages in a silent and gradual struggle with the canvas, so that it returns what he likes to call the “andamenti,” the inner movements that he feels emerge from himself, in a continuous alternation between excess and stillness, impulse and control, instinct and reasoning.

It is an experience that he himself describes as crossing a minefield, in which he strenuously attempts to “soften psychological discomfort with a tube of acrylic.”

The works on display thus take the form of veritable archives of memory: letters addressed to himself to vent, leave imprinted memories, process feelings, question himself. As if they were written in an attempt to establish a dialogue with himself, or with someone identified as an other than himself.

He often focuses attention on the subject of error and its importance, in a constant attempt to improve himself.

Sometimes he spurs himself to avoid influences, whether mental, social, or cultural so as not to risk seeing only what one wants, or what one is used to seeing.

He externalizes his emotions, is surprised to feel them, rejoices in them.

He carries out radical experimentation, allowing himself to be absorbed completely, driven by the need to understand himself.

Referring to constructs of an architectural matrix, he regulates the structural aspect of the work with the black sign, while he develops the ornamental aspect with color, with a clear preference for pure primary colors, which bring the luminous and vibrant aspect to the work.

In some works the textual component is made with an alcohol-based graphic draft ink, which on contact with the fixative is bound to evaporate, some in fact already have the fading patina that suggests its perishing nature; otherwise the pictorial component has been imprinted on the canvas with the fixative.

A sign that the artist traces with his own gesture, which is sometimes more rapid and nervous, sometimes cadenced and uniform, but always traceable to an action that is neither planned nor reckless: it is accomplished through a gradual accumulation and refinement of experience in the course of making.