Goshts run with me, says Peter Lorre in”M” by Fritz Lang
Gosths run with all of us, I run after mine with my painting
Luca Coser

Taking possession of what is invisible to the eye seems to be the aim of Luca Coser's artwork;  seizing, within the incandescent nebula of human emotions, those invisible paths, which are our deepest feelings, that like loose clinches keep us anchored to the quay of life, leaving us enough room to flutter, exposed to the elements of our lives. This book talks also about that, of what Martin Heidegger has pointed out as the “emotional situation”, that is our being in the world already and always throughout our self-finding (befindlichkeit). A Stimmung, as the Romantics call it: a mood, accompanying us through our life in every single moment, which is not an incidental emotion- with a cause and an effect- but it is rather a kind of often silent noise in the background, offering a support to rationality and its conceiving of everything in terms of categories: truth and lie, good and bad.

From Wim Wenders' movie The American Friend Luca Coser seizes the pre-text for a journey to the centre of his own condition as an existing subject, as “a flinged project”, in search of the nerve centres of his own emotional experience. One hundred paintings narrate the last appropriation of the movie, which has been trapped in Luca Coser's intellective galaxy and which ends up being used like a mirror. The artist has already met and crashed against the greatest movies of all times. In the past, he had  pictorially taken possession of The Adventure by Michelangelo Antonioni, M-the Monster of Dusseldorf by Fritz Lang and Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder, in order to draw a personal and wonderful fresco representing the self-celebration of the modern Subject, contended by his thousands parallel, hypothetical and wished lives. The mass media not only, as Andy Warhol said, entitles everyone to be in the limelight for fifteen minutes but also build a labyrinth of hungering mirrors-where we could lose ourselves and live for ever.

Luca Coser's generation is that of the flowing back of the eighties, when culture, after the intense years of the Protest that bursted into terrorism, becomes a private experience, an inner getaway and a solution to the seatback of an utopia which is never accomplished unless as a new possibility for consumption. The cultural industry explodes thanks to the bursting into scene of the new techniques, like the personal computer or the home video. Commercial televisions arrive and offer new and diverse programmes. Luca Coser’s reaction to such setback is the “animal movement” of a new kind of man, a “barbarian” following Alessandro Barrico’s recent definition. His instinctive reaction is an omnivore consumption of books, music, movies that –once he has become a painter- he selects and portrays (he has done so with music tracks, books titles and movies). He sees himself like an impressionist artist of his own times. Rather than wandering around fields and city streets in order to describe reality, he finds in the cultural products he uses (which nourish his dream and visions) the views of a great landscape. An interior landscape, we could say. Eventually, what he really does is make his own timeless self-portray.

In his book, “Minori Maniere”, Achille Bonito Oliva talks about the sixth century in order to explain the starting point of his theory on the “Trans-avant-garde” movement. He says: “The strong subject of the Renaissance is replaced by a minor subject, that feels a sense of inferiority facing a dominating and prevailing reality. Therefore, the artist uses the element of drama, myth and tragedy as linguistic conventions.” Up to this point Luca Coser experience is fairly similar: he is an artist that comes after the new aesthetics choices of the Neo-avant-garde in the sixties and seventies, when the strong subject had established a new language and had supported new ideas and a new Weltanschauung. Luca Coser also uses arts like conventional languages, from which he distillates painting extracting the lifeblood to create a signic landscape, which is fatally redundant and full of echoes coming from a world (that of art) which is dèjà vu and yet mysterious. In his installation Luca Coser transforms the screen diachronic editing into a synchronic panocticon (all frames are on the wall) and the film becomes a fresco, a painting, a landscape. Bonito Oliva adds: “Quotation becomes the process inspiring the taking back of cultural models the sixth century’s artist could not possibly identify himself with. Their strumental use and not their projection allows the taking  back of such models as a mere diverted and diverting sign.” Here, Luca Coser takes the distance from most of the “Trans-avant-garde.” His appropriation has an opposite character, it is not playful but thoughtful. He identifies himself with his own cultural models, which he likes to isolate by posing them on a stand and portraying them in an accomplished way. He seizes their background vibration, their philosophical and lyrical spirit. He does not choose Wim Vender’s movie for its formal elegance; he hammers away with a (psycho)analytical outburst because such artwork -the movie that he watches over and over again-  is not the mere story of a man that, affected by an incurable disease, decided to become an hatched man in order to leave his son some money to rely on. Luca Coser sees Wim Vender’s movie as a landscape that the otaku inside him overlooks at in solitude. Like the wanderer in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting (“The Wanderer Above the Mist”), he is able to recognize romantically that the beauty before him is nothing else but the nature metaphor of his inner pulsating microcosm. Fear of death, fatherhood, lie are just some among the movie subjects that the painter, who has reached fatherhood, is now able to see because it is only now that he knows what being a father means. Fear of death and the progeny enter his visual field and he can do nothing but portray them in every single frame, absorbing their power through a distillation process and giving them a new mute word through painting. “ Sight comes before words”, as John Berger writes in “Ways of Seeing”. Nicola Davide Angerame

Personal shows (selection):
2011 1+1=1, D406 Arte Contemporanea, a cura di S. Taddei e F. Baboni, Modena
2010 1+1=1, Whitelabs, a cura di Nicola Angerame, Milano
2010 1+1=1, Overfoto, a cura di Nicola Angerame, Napoli
2010 1+1=1, Kip's Gallery, a cura di Nicola Angerame, New York
2009 Heidi's Shop, Atelier Forum, MUSEION, Bolzano
2009 Comedians, Kreis Fur Kunst Und Kultur, Ortisei Bz
2006 Microsoft Research University of Trento, Trento
2005 Kunstforum, Egna Bz
2001 Cima Gallery, Palm Beach, Florida USA (con Jane Manus)
2000 Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea, a cura di Vittoria Coen Trento

Group shows (selection):
2009 Route tournante en sous-bois, a cura di F. Mazzonelli e S. Conta, Upload, Trento
2009 Il Mucchio Selvaggio, a cura di Andrea Lo Savio, Galleria D406, Modena
2009 Ad Librandum, a cura di A. Zanchetta e S. Portinari, Andrea Arte Contemporanea
2009 Work in Progress, a cura di Sergio Annovi, Ex Ballarini, Sassuolo (MD)
2008 Fuori Luogo (evento collat. Manifesta7), a cura di F. Mazzonelli e D. Dogheria, Trento
2007 Auguri ad Arte, su invito di Paolo Maria Deanesi Gallery, MART, Rovereto (TN)
2007 1:1, a cura di Francesca Referza, Torre Bruciata, Teramo
2006 Neverending Cinema, a cura di Fabio Cavallucci, Gall Civica Arte Contemporanea, Trento
2003 Situazioni, Mart, Rovereto (TN)
2002 3 Artisti in barca, a cura di Luca Beatrice e Nicola Angerame, Pio Monti, Roma
1995 Percorsi, a cura di Danilo Eccher, Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea, Trento
1992 Trento-Salzburg, a cura di Danilo Eccher e Dietgard Grimmer, Galleria Civica d'Arte Contemporanea, Trento e  Traklhaus, Salisburgo