Cosmic Hug Project. Connecting Art and People Together

Art goes Social Network – Italian artist Enrico Magnani tells about origin, meaning, and perspectives of his engaging artistic project.

As often happens, it all started almost by chance. I cannot say exactly where or when, but in the spring of 2013 I felt the desire to create an artwork that would intensify the bond between the artist, the artwork itself, and the collectors. Usually, when an artwork is sold, it leaves the atelier and only a virtual bond, with the one who created it, remains. The artist is the creator and that’s all.

With this goal in mind, I made the first Cosmic Hug. Twenty-five small single paintings that together form a unique greater artwork. A sort of chessboard or mosaic with separable tiles. I thought I would keep to myself the central tile and leave the others to anyone who wanted to be part of the project. In this way, the collectors would have been the owners of a part of the whole, as the artist himself, reinforcing the bond between people and the artwork itself that becomes a symbol.

But, if Cosmic Hug Project had to be coherent with its name, I could not stop for a single creation of twenty-five pieces. It was therefore natural to think of creating many more in the same way, but I also wanted all the tiles of the mosaics to be all connected, in some way, among each other.

The central tile of each new mosaic had to be that of the artist and it had to remain the same in every artwork. The tile in the middle of the first mosaic would have been taken and placed in the center of the second, and then in the third, and in the fourth, and so on… The central tile, that of the artist, mine, would become a common thread, a red wire, that sews together all mosaics, one after the other, picking on it, physically, colors and shapes of each new artwork. In this way, all the owners of the tiles will be united by belonging to a single mosaic and, at the same time, thanks to the central tile, to the other mosaics as well.

I have always spoken of “mosaic” to better explain how the project works, but, speaking about Cosmic Hug, I prefer to talk in terms of “galaxy”. The aesthetics of the artwork looks like a small galaxy in which the color gold is dropped on a dark background (blue, brown or black) in order to remind a galaxy seen from afar: a circle or a spiral. This is the idea related to the form of the work, but in addition to the form, there is also the content.

Each Cosmic Hug contains, in fact, a part painted by the case and a part painted by the will of the artist. The dripping (painting technique by which the paint freely drips on the canvas), with which the galaxy is created, it cannot be completely controlled; one cannot require every single drop of color to fall exactly on a well defined point of the canvas; much takes place according to random laws. This reminds us of the unpredictable side of human life. In the universe, in addition to disorder, case, and chaos, there is order as well. Life, even from the scientific point of view, is order, entropy decrease, physicists would say; death is disorder and increase of entropy. From the Big Bang, in fact, from the primordial chaos, life has made its way together with order represented, in these artworks, by the Greek cross; the cross is the archetypal symbol for life and physical body. Each work represents, therefore, as a small universe, a part of chaos and disorder, and a part of life and order; reminding us, once more, our role in the universe. We, the living, are points of order and perfection and we are all part of a structure much bigger than us. We can only rejoice and never forget our connection with the universe and with other human beings with the awarness that each of our actions will have an effect on everything else.

A “hug” is a gesture of unity, but also of love and to remain consistent until the end I wished to give a generous and humanitarian meaning to this artistic project; therefore, a further and important mission that Cosmic Hug Project aims is to support the causes of humanitarian organizations in order to participate, in practice and not only ideally, in the embetterment of our planet and our lives.