THE COMEL AWARD FINALISTS 2012

Ezio Colosimo

Catanzaro – ITALY
http://www.colosimoarte.it

THE COMEL AWARD FINALISTS 2012

Ezio Colosimo

Catanzaro – ITALY
http://www.colosimoarte.it
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Ezio Colosimo was born in 1950 in Catanzaro. He graduated from the Institute of Art and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, specializing in Set Design.

His artistic activity began in 1968, and his first exhibition took place in 1970 at the "Saletta dell'Arte" in Terracina. Subsequently, Colosimo gained various experiences in ceramics, particularly at the "Santilli" studio in Urbino, focusing on raku ceramics, and he also delved into graphic techniques and engraving. Since 1976, his works have been part of the Historical Archive of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. He has been featured in prominent art magazines and catalogs such as Annuario d'Arte Moderna, Artisti Contemporanei 1996, Mondo Arte, etc. His artworks are present in public and private collections.

He has received recognition from art critics and writers such as M. Aschelter, F. Bassoli, P. Di Tano, G. Filippetti, C. Fino, F. Marletta, E. Mercuri, M. Riposati, and V. Riviello. Currently, he lives and works in Latina.

ARTWORK IN CONTEST

X - UNA STORIA. RACCONTI - APPUNTI (2012)

SCULPTURE - aluminium, plexiglass, acrylic paints

Ezio Colosimo's mastery as a scribe is well-known, as he deftly navigates a highly personalized pseudo-writing, carefully drawing from the sign heritage of past civilizations and reinterpreting it in a contemporary context. This time, the base of the signs becomes aluminum, an extremely soft and ductile material that willingly allows itself to be wounded, incised, forged, melted, and transformed without resistance, under Ezio's skillful hand. Above all, he loves experimentation, investigation, and creative play.

Like a contemporary scribe, the artist meticulously traces each sign he considers sacred, magical, because it carries healthy impulses from space-time coordinates that cannot be identified. 'X una storia - racconti/appunti' (For a story - stories/notes) is a tautological title for an artwork that precisely embodies this: a story, made of notes, annotations, insights, and reflections that constitute the process of making and the making of process. In this sense, the artwork is nothing more than the final stage of a much longer and agonizing process that begins in his mind before taking shape in his laboratory-scriptorium. And it remains such: primarily a mental work that surrenders to matter just enough to be visible, nothing more.

Symbols, hieroglyphs, pictograms, and ideograms alternate seamlessly in an infinite play, where the sign becomes drawing and writing, always gesture, never word, rather a note: "a notation (...) reflects a temporal instance, a transitional aspect of time, from an initial situation to a subsequent one, where it is necessary to preserve something from the past. (..) It becomes easy to see how the term 'note' largely coincides with its semantic aspect with that of 'sign': a note is precisely the sign of something else, and a sign becomes a note about something."*

The value of the sign lies in its capacity to carry distant, ambiguous, and indefinite messages in that semiotic processuality that allows room for esoteric, magical, fantastic, and occult drifts, on which Ezio 'plays' and engages his unaware players.

Andrea Valle, La notazione musicale contemporanea: aspetti semiotici ed estetici, EDT, Tornio 2002, pp. 1-2.

AWARDS

COMEL AWARD FINALIST 2012