ART-PRESENTATION: Enzo Cucchi

Since the very beginning of his career, Enzo Cucchi stood out as an artist of great originality against the backdrop of the conceptual panorama of the late 70s. While adopting the experimentalism typical of the tendencies of the time, Cucchi did not renounce more traditional expressive means in creating his art. His installations are made of diverse materials in which the image – whether painted, sculpted, or drawn – always maintains a primary role. Considered the most visionary among the artists of the Transavanguardia, Cucchi achieved international renown during the 80s.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MAXXI Archive

For Enzo Cucchi, painting, sculpture, and drawing are the means necessary to externalize his own inner reality, a direct line to his own subconscious; his images belong to a poetic universe that often allude to the everyday world and its culture. Enzo Cucchi, one of the most influential figures on the contemporary art scene, presents a new project designed specifically for the spaces of the Gian Ferrari Gallery at MAXXI. An extraordinary inventor of powerful and enigmatic images, the artist’s research incorporates dreamlike visions, mystical and religious popular culture of his homeland and art history in “Cubist Animal of the 1900s” (2019), with explicit references to classical literature and mythology, which translates into an aesthetic that ranges between time and history, thus synthesising individual myths and collective imagination. Enzo Cucchi proposes a single work on display: a radical gesture in his rarefaction of a single object, of modest dimensions in relation to the architecture of space designed by Zaha Hadid, exhibited on a base that itself becomes an integral part of the work. An even more radical gesture is that of the marble sculpture, because it is underlined by other interventions in the gallery that serve as thresholds, notes, corollary Insigna [Signs] and which thus reaffirm the uniqueness and centrality of the work. A putto, to whose big toe a scorpion appears to cling, hands to eyes in the gesture of the telescope for focusing the vision, reinterprets in an extremely contemporary image the classic iconography of the naked child, with references that recur in the history of art and that go from the Roman statuary to the great Baroque frescoes. In the representation of the cupid conceived by the artist, art and myth, science and astrology merge: its cheerful game is marred by the threat of the poisonous animal which, according to Greek mythology, had killed the hunter Orion because of his arrogance, where the scorpion is symbol of the unknown and even of death, an allegory of mystery and the occult. With this work/gesture,Enzo Cucchi finally returns to talk about Rome, his adopted city, in whose cradle he has always nourished himself and in which he captures the sense of personal and civil resistance to the unstoppable progress of a world based on speed and emergency and of a culture of technology and science that increasingly drains the spaces of desire and freedom of thought every day.

Info: MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo – Via Guido Reni 4A, Rome,  Duration: 17/10/19-19/1/20, Days & Hours: Tue & Fri-Sat 11:00-20:00, Wed-Thu & Sun 11:00-19:00, www.maxxi.art