2023-05-16 16:06:53
Time.news – Al via al MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, the exhibition “Enzo Cucchi. The Poet and the Magician”, edited by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Luigia Lonardelli. It is not a classic retrospective, rather it is an unpublished portrait of a multifaceted and visionary artist, who has been able to maintain such a coherence in diversity as to be considered an essential point of reference also for the younger generations of artists. “More than an exhibition, it wants to be a tribute that the museum pays to the artist, and a tribute that the artist pays to himself”, said the president of MAXXI, Alessandro Giuli.
Cucchi (Morro D’Alba 1949) is one of the most prolific and original artists on the contemporary scene, a free thinker and unconventional. The search for him is rooted in the written word and flourishes in a myriad of signs, symbols and expressive languages. Like an alchemist he bewitches and shapes matter, like a storyteller he evokes stories, myths and places.
The beyond two hundred works on display, many of which have never been exhibited before, punctuate a immersive path and full of surprises, a story for scattered pages that rejects any chronological linearity and returns a creativity in constant motion.
The exhibition takes place in Gallery 4 of the museum where, like traces scattered throughout the space, monumental works, drawings, small bronzes, potterygraphics and artist’s books continually intercept the visitor’s gaze.
In the installation, conceived following a design cue from the artist, the works are suspended from the ceiling, raised to different heights or even “escape” to the outside. Cucchi shows and hides and, like a magician, invites wonder.
Opening the event Bartholomew Pietromarchi explained that “the exhibition is designed to let you enter the she is by Enzo Cucchi and lose yourself in the world of his imagination. An immersive experience, where the liberated image finds its privileged field of expression in the freedom of techniques, references, cross-references, quotations, allusions and illusions, but also with the ghosts and shadows of itself. Because the path you find yourself following touches the chords of the depths and the unconscious through the light and shadow of revelation and concealment”.
Luigia Lonardelli observed that “Enzo Cucchi’s practice is placed in a limbo in which every identifying hypothesis immediately becomes controversial and contradictory. By tackling the design of the exhibition itinerary, we started from this element, accepting it as an integral part of the artist’s work” .
For the artist from the Marches, the works of the past are a constant source of inspiration. It can be said that walking through the rooms you come across a lot of art history, which he reinterprets, making it current, in a continuous breaking of patterns.
The entrance to the exhibition takes place within a reading area: it is a reproduction of the Enzo Cucchi’s library, a selection of books loved by the artist for the public to browse. The readings reveal passions, influences, aspirations and this choice of titles, a prelude to the portrait that MAXXI wanted to dedicate to the artist, bears witness to an insatiable curiosity.
The exhibition, which will remain open until 24 September, is organized in close dialogue with the Enzo Cucchi Archive, curated by his son Alessandro.
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