Riccardo di Cosmo

Born in 61, adventurous and highly curious, I used to spend hours on end stretched out on the floor outlining Burda Style dress patterns for my mum, who, as a seamstress, would then skill-fully cut and saw.

A series of frames, images of Rome, of its Walls and Baths, brick facades; images repeated with a steady rhythm; the history of photographic paper and Polaroids laid on the canvas, cemented on a bed of heavy stucco and mortar; at times with the frames drowned in the material, at others separated, with the surface cracking and creating tridimensional effects, a textured mirror of the city.

Nonetheless, life sometimes breathes elsewhere and so I set out with Elisabetta, my life companion, to touch art with our own hands and we went in lengthy journeys with maps and books all crumpled up looking for Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. We would get in our “two horses" Citroen 2CV for endless drives and circumnavigations of France, Spain, and Portugal, Germany, and The Netherlands, all the way up to Norway and Turkey to the East. 

I would come back from these journeys with a new soul and a transparent gaze; full of photos and charcoal sketches, stones where I could find traces to follow with colours, and I would then begin to draw and see what is not there!…

Find this artist and many more in our collection of works from the Gestural Abstraction Movement.