Forging iron, discovering man
By Mario Michele Pascale
Roberto Cosimi is neither Catholic nor Christian. At least in the conventional sense of the term. He does not follow the liturgy or understand the need for a priestly order and an ecclesiastical hierarchy. However, he believes in the need for men to look beyond matter. There are questions that relate to life and death, to suffering and justice, to good and evil, on which we cannot rationally give answers. There exists in us a tension towards the infinite and the absolute. And we also have an enormous need to love and be loved, as creatures thrown into the world. To get out of our loneliness by understanding the unhappiness and the tragedy to which many people owe.
Roberto Cosimi is a communist and socialist heretic. Or at least it was until communism existed and socialism was serious. The idea of a society of equals attracted him and attracted him, where each of us would have satisfied his own material needs and would have been free from hunger and needs, ready to pursue his spiritual, intellectual, cultural needs. Far from the violence of which communism was also capable, from Budapest to Prague. But not only.
Once the great liberation ideologies of the '900 are over, what remains, if not the human? The sorrowful humanity that is thirsty, hungry, dies in the Mediterranean to escape death, which flees the war, which every day, in our cities, in our suburbs is at war to survive. That humanity that is brutally killed by those who also have the courage to say: "I do it for love". Existential loneliness, suffering, violence against women, violence against migrants, children, in a world that could have space and resources for everyone.
Addressing a god, in this case, would do well. It would be comforting. If Roberto Cosimi was a Catholic or at least a Christian he would do the same. But someone, before him, already did it, from the top of a cross. Her question, which sounds like a cannon shot in the history of the West: "Father, why have you abandoned me?", Has been lost in silence: no one has deigned to give her an answer. What remains of this question is a corpse. Some say he is resurrected. Well, but it is perhaps a question of faith, certainly of privilege. If the son of the god rises again, however tortured, millions of human beings have been condemned to the silence of their graves. The dead of Sabra and Shatila, nor those of Aushwitz, and not even the victims of the gulag have not risen.
They evidently were not the children of ...
Roberto Cosimi uses nails for his creations. Nails are a useful tool for humans, they hold wood together. They bear the weight of the frames, therefore also of the art that is contained there and of our memories in the form of photography. Yet they are also an instrument of torture. Jesus of Nazareth knows something about it. The choice of nails in Cosimi's works is not accidental. It is ambiguity, the ambivalence of life, a source of joy, but also of deep pain. And in the end who among us, in his existence, does not count only the pain, leaving out the moments of happiness? Pain is a founding experience, it forges us, creates in us an atavistic and instrumental sense of what is good and what is wrong. Pain shapes us, just as Cosimi builds his works with fire. In the same measure, fear is forged, which is always and only fear of suffering and dying. As much as we try to idealize and make death beautiful, it terrifies us: we invented the resurrection to make it less categorical and vampires to make it less categorical and more sympathetic to the rising bourgeoisie. The official iconographies of the battlefields make us read heroic soldiers who die in the woods, as if they were falling asleep: never their guts. But death is this: anguish, fear, flesh that is lost, breaks down. In those who observe a loved one die guilt takes over. One would like to be in their place or, at least, in the moment in which life runs away, preventing sleep from conquering us, from the tiredness of possessing us, to be always present, until the last.
Roberto Cosimi uses nails for his creations. Nails are a useful tool for humans, they hold wood together. They bear the weight of the frames, therefore also of the art that is contained there and of our memories in the form of photography. Yet they are also an instrument of torture. Jesus of Nazareth knows something about it. The choice of nails in Cosimi's works is not accidental. It is ambiguity, the ambivalence of life, a source of joy, but also of deep pain. And in the end who among us, in his existence, does not count only the pain, leaving out the moments of happiness? Pain is a founding experience, it forges us, creates in us an atavistic and instrumental sense of what is good and what is wrong. Pain shapes us, just as Cosimi builds his works with fire. In the same measure, fear is forged, which is always and only fear of suffering and dying. As much as we try to idealize and make death beautiful, it terrifies us: we invented the resurrection to make it less categorical and vampires to make it less categorical and more sympathetic to the rising bourgeoisie. The official iconographies of the battlefields make us read heroic soldiers who die in the woods, as if they were falling asleep: never their guts. But death is this: anguish, fear, flesh that is lost, breaks down. In those who observe a loved one die guilt takes over. One would like to be in their place or, at least, in the moment in which life runs away, preventing sleep from conquering us, from the tiredness of possessing us, to be always present, until the last.
The nails once closed the coffins. Deaf and definitive blows. Today, steel screws and the buzz of the cordless drill are preferred. More practical, less poetic. Cosimi brings us back to that definitive fact in speaking also of death. And it reminds us, with its nails, as in a game of swings, of the beauty of life.
The aesthetic experience in front of the works of Roberto Cosimi is total. Looking at them is not enough. We must touch them, test the iron, its roughness, the consistency of the paint, counting the roughness of the primeval material one by one. Iron is the essence of the earth is a very hot stormy sea at the center of our planet. Exactly how it creates magnetism, it emits a call to us: it is something ancestral, which has to do with our biological roots. We hear this archaic whisper whenever we are faced with a sculpture by Cosimi. An artist who has the ability to remove, from the primordial, all the artificial frills and embellishments and bring it back to its raw, natural state. He molds it, therefore, giving it archetypal forms: men, women, children, stormy seas, vigorous hands capable of sweetness and yet instruments of violence.
It is worthwhile, therefore, to sit in front of one of these works without having to hurry, meditating, listening to the vibrations that arise within us in front of the work of master Cosimi.