Artist: Iacopo Cecchi
Year: 2020
These works are a practice that started in 2017, arises from the need to bring with me the memory of a place,a fragment of its beauty.
The drawing depicts the rocks fracture, void and internal tensions over millions of years.
Using the frottage technique I make a drawing of a chosen place and at the same time I put my body in relation with the space and the landscape.
It a cognitive experience.
They are traced on old maps of places far and different from my path. The also lead nowhere as the tracks have lost contact with reality, with the rock itself. Now they form another reality, they bring with them another beauty made of signs, numbers, colors an cracks.
The drawing is also what remains, a document of a performance and memory.
I like the relationship of different scales. The track done by frottaging a real piece of rock is basically a mould, therefore its scale is 1:1. The map used to work it out is probably 1:50 or 1:100. However, there are still common shapes, they keep bearing a resemblance to each other. Whether a crest or a void on a rock can remind a mountain skyline or the shape of a coast on the map, it looks like a single fragment of the nature could address the whole world. The feeling I got watching this art work suggest me that we (human being) are about to discover a kind of new golden ratio. An intimate secret-never concealed by nature though-that leads us to became familiar with a natural endemic process. A step further into environmental awareness.
I love the idea to have more people walk in the nature looking at things like they are important and elevated as they are in the museums.
I like your work, interesting that you used frotage as a way to bring the memory of the place with you. It is something more intimate than photography. I also feel this need to put myself in contact with space, being part of nature. It is a little distressing to be now reclusive at home and to seek this insertion through the screens.