PAOLO COTANI
Paolo Cotani is an Italian painter and artist. He was born in Rome on November 5, 1940. After graduating from the Art High School, he went to Paris in 1959 to study tapestry and stained glass techniques at the Academy of Decorative Arts. Returning to Rome in 1961, he attended courses at the French Academy participating in some group exhibitions.
From 1964 to 1970 he stayed in London where, thanks to his friendship with Joseph Rykwert, he obtained a teaching position at the Colchester School of Art where he taught courses on Techniques and materials of historical avant-gardes and worked on several theatrical set designs.
In 1968 he held his first solo exhibition at the Ferro di Cavallo Gallery in Rome. In the early seventies, Paolo Cotani joined that research area interested in analyzing the syntactic tools of language, known as the Zero Degree of painting.
From 1971 the first contacts with Giorgio Cortenova and Filiberto Menna, theorist of Analytical Painting, began. In 1975 he exhibited the first elastic bandages at the IX Paris Biennale and, in the same year, exhibited in the Analytische Malerei exhibition organized by the La Bertesca Gallery in the venues of Genoa, Milan, and Düsseldorf. In 1977 he was invited to the exhibition 16 Italian Artists in Rotterdam. In 1979 he set up his first solo exhibition at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. From this period are the first artworks with shaped aluminum support, The Arches and The Sails, later returning to painting with the theme of Clouds.
In the eighties he met Ralph Gibson with whom he established a long collaboration, and with whom he created in 1981 the exhibition Metafora at the Giudecca Shipyards, in Venice for which they created together the lithographs of the series Metafora, also presented in New York by Castelli Graphics. In 1985 he was invited to the exhibition L’Italie aujourd’hui / Italia oggi held at Villa Arson, Nice. The following year he participated in the XI Quadriennale in Rome. The early nineties saw the Cancellations and Tensions, elastic bandages mounted on steel structures.
In 1991 he held the retrospective exhibition The constancy of vision at Palazzo Forti in Verona. In 2008 he exhibited at the exhibition Analytical Painting - The Italian paths 1970-1980 at the Permanente in Milan. While preparing the exhibition at the Ducal Palace of Senigallia, Paolo Cotani died in January 2011.
