IL GIOCO – IL COWBOY | OLIVIERO FIORENZI

IL GIOCO – Il Cowboy (2022) is an artwork part of Otto Cieli series by Oliviero Fiorenzi. The artist takes up a childhood object, the kite, to use it as a support for the representation of his visual alphabet: the toy is transformed into a “canvas”, conceived as a new support for the artist’s world. By creating a portal within the childhood imagination, Fiorenzi shows us the most playful but also the most intimate part of his artistic research: a cowboy with saturated colors and stylized outlines decorates the aerodynamic structure of the kite made with eco-sustainable materials. Hovering from the sky, the image finds a new way of exposure and relationship with the environment. During the flight tests of this unusual canvas, the artist in collaboration with the photographer Matteo Natalucci creates a series of photographs, generating new images. The stratification of symbols that add up one level after another defines the work as an artistic experience and a game, so as to make the artist’s childhood accessible to the observer and creating a bridge with the memories and the past of each of us .

Childhood is the moment in which for the first time the imaginary is experienced as a game: stories, characters and environments are built and lived with extreme vividness. IL GIOCO – Il Cowboy is an open image capable of linking present and past, current experience and memory. By disclosing a movement, an image and an environment before the gaze, Fiorenzi offers the observer the experience of being a child: the image of the cowboy becomes an archetypal image capable of expanding as a message through its visual use.

Furthermore, the choice to use the kite as a support is part of the artist’s search for coexistence between the work and the environment: “I like to observe how an outdoor exhibition space allows the work to live in the moment and to be conditioned by external factors – often natural – in an uncontrolled and unpredictable way, untying the artistic object from me and my will” This action, in addition to abstracting the work from a traditional context and conception, gives the chance to rethink the artist practice thought an exploration of new environments and images under construction. Furthermore, in the design of the kite, the artist also rediscovers his engineering skills bringing together aerial experiments and intimate and artistic expression. Fiorenzi invades various fields of investigation, rediscovering himself as an artist, a child and an engineer. The transition from one expressive environment to another, the addition of different temporal planes and the stratifications of objects/images make IL GIOCO – Il Cowboy a work that surprises and enchants, just like a run across a meadow chasing the whirlwinds of a kite.

Oliviero Fiorenzi
IL GIOCO – Il Cowboy, 2022
Mixed Media, 190 x 55 cm
© Photo: Matteo Natalucci

28/03/2023