Andrea Morucchio the Book

catalogue curated by Laura Poletto

texts by Claudia Amato, Marco Baravalle, Maria Livia Brunelli, Saverio Simi De Burgis, Beppe Caccia, Elisa Capitanio, Marina Castrillo, Francesca Colasante, Gaia Conti, Noel Frankham, Andrea Morucchio, Domitilla Musella, Andrea Pagnes, Laura Poletto, Efthalia Rentetzi, Paolo Toffolutti, Saramicol Viscardi, Gadi Luzzato Voghera, Alberto Zanchetta

translations by Giuliana Racco

© Andrea Morucchio 2010

Andrea Morucchio

index 1 Andrea Morucchio: notes for a profile Laura Poletto

5 Sculpture - works

75 Solo & group sculpture, print shows

119 Installation

151 Making of

155 Video sound installations

227 Light projections 235 Photography - works

365 Solo & group photography shows

391 Biography 393 Exhibitions chronology

394 Selected bibliography

Andrea Morucchio: notes for a profile by Laura Poletto

To approach Andrea Morucchio’s work means to enter into a somewhat disorienting proteiform creative dimension, which has formed itself along a vast horizon of investigation. In fact, for over a decade the art-ist has used the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance in a continuous experimentation of expression, experience, and sense creation. If his first medium of choice was photog-raphy, since the end of the 1990s Morucchio has shifted to plumb the depths of the spatial implications of sculpture, beginning with the production of a series of works in glass and iron (Blade and Enlightenments). The dynamic relationship between antithetical elements, a fundamental and recurring component of his poetics, is present already in these works, enabling a number of dualistic associations: glass and iron, fra-gility and resistance, transparency and opacity, mobility and stasis, activity and passivity. This relationship determines those “tensions” - at times implicit, at others explicit - running through his practice, in which a sensory interest in form and the expressive power of material is never disconnected from the symbolic and metaphoric aspects. In concert with the balanced and meditated definition of these first sculptural works – both essential and evocative – is a profound understanding of the intrinsic properties of glass.

The artist is well acquainted with this material and its various effects, possibilities, and production tech-niques. Iron structures suspend or halt glass blades, accentuating the sense of mobility, “contingency” and fragility (Blade, 1999). Transparent glass wedges rip open immobile iron surfaces. Through their lumi-nous reflections, they project themselves beyond their own formal limits, expanding in space and tending to dematerialize matter itself (Enlightenments). Splitting space, ripping through the darkness of metal to introduce light through the transparency and purity of glass, these sculptures not only correspond to an investigation of an aesthetic nature, but also an ethical one. They express a need to “clarify”, a will for discernment, and a liberation from the heaviness/oppression of the indistinct and confused. In some ways, the search for a charge from the materials comes close to an Arte Povera-like sensibility, yet Morucchio channels this potential into rigorous and determinate forms produced with extreme precision. His long and complex process of elaboration does not reduce or eliminate the soul, rather, it seems almost to condense or to “protect” it. Thus begins a “catalogue” of almost archetypal, sacred or ritual images of strong se-mantic valences. They are bearers of a continuous confrontation of forces: from the luminous trajectories of the crystal wedges of the Enlightenments sculptures to the blades of glass frozen in their forward thrust by barriers of metal (Wave, 2001), to the levigated bundles of sandblasted javelins held together by the “constriction” of strips of inner tubes (Accumulo, 2002).

Interest in a development of form and matter in space – clearly identifiable in the Enlightenment series – continues through the environmental interventions produced in 2002 at the Chiostri di San Pietro in Reggio Emilia and in 2003 in Australia at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Hobart. In fact, Percer-Voir (2002) seems to be the “environmental” evolution of the first sculptural attempts combined with an intensified search for a vaster sensorial and perceptive space that is always more interactive with the observer. The repeated choice of glass, characterizing this phase of the artist’s production, is determined by the specific properties of the material: transparency and the effects of dematerialization and dynamization caused by reflections. In fact, the title Percer-Voir, playing on the terms perceive, pierce, and see, reintroduces the linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical need to open up new possibilities of perception, of understanding, and of discerning beyond visual, sensorial or intellectual habits. Thus, an investigation that tends to cross the most diverse forms of appearance or habit continues.

Inserting a series of crystal glass spikes into a field or onto the mirrored surface of a lake, the artist uses natural reflections of light – and of water – on the vitreous matter in order to generate new contexts of experience, developing the emotional and perceptive qualities of the substance, “opening” the observer’s field of vision to another experience of the space. In Iconoclasm (2003), a particular property of glass takes on a strictly metaphoric sense: the ability to absorb and imprison light, making it its very essence, is used as a “visual” metaphor of the mechanisms of formation, affirmation and persistence of Totalitarian powers – nazism in primis - over the subdued masses. The use of critical, political and social languages precisely constitutes one of the main nodes of his eclectic practice: from references to terrorist-like “supreme sac-rifices”, inherent in the audio-visual installation Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno (2002), produced for the Sala Rossa of Venice’s Museo Mocenigo, to the light installation Pulse Red (Punta della Dogana, Venice), alarm warning against the risks of congestion of mass-media information, from the complex Australian multime-dia work Eidetic Bush, to Laudes Regiae (2007), an installation conceived for the ex Convento dei Santi Cosma e Damiano on the Giudecca island.

In Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno Morucchio draws inspiration from an 18th century painting conserved in Palazzo Mocenigo, representing the heroic act of Capitano da Mar Zaccaria Mocenigo who decided to explode his ship, sacrificing his own life and that of his crew rather than surrender to the enemy. Extrapo-lating a sequence of photographic frames of the victims’ bodies from the painting, he develops a video where they are enlarged yet reduced to simple silhouettes projected around the original image. Amongst the lilies of the wall brocade, the inconsistent outlines of the “sacrificed” appear and dissolve to the rhythm of Luigi Nono’s chorus Il Canto Sospeso – inspired by the letter of a man condemned to death for resisting Nazi-Fascism. They are swept into the whirlwind of a sea reddened with Macbeth-like dramatic flavour, of “blood that calls out for blood”. With Eidetic Bush (2003), produced during his residency at the Tasmanian School of Art in Hobart, Australia, he touches on one of the region’s most pressing problems - the massive destruction of the wooded areas caused by the effects of global warming and the devastating practices of deforestation. Through their spectral chromatic abatement, the abandoned scenarios of the blazed woods of Tasmania become the sites of a complex process uniting performance and digital operations.

Morucchio’s interventions in the bush seem capable of reactivating the power of imagination. The marks engraved into the bark and the spirals of clay modeled on the burnt trunks appear like elements of a re-appropriation rite – a re-appropriation of the possibility of existing and imagining again. They present the possibility of “rewriting” one’s own existential perimeters in a space where combustion has cancelled out memory – thus, space and time – following a devastation which inevitably alludes to that inflicted by West-ern people on the aborigine population, pillaged of the territory so inextricably linked to their culture, and therefore completely cancelled. In the video projections, the engraved or clay spirals combine with other digitally constructed ones, appearing and disappearing to the rhythm of Nono’s Caminantes...Ayacucho. The observer truly seems to enter a mysterious eidetic space, where the “revolt” of a distant memory is reactivated and the first signs of a lost spirituality are rewritten. The ability to relate and dialogue with the preexisting – be it a place, a historical testimony or a work of art – is at the origin of the majority of Moruc-chio’s practice. Not dissimilar to Eidetic Bush, is the public art intervention Pulse Red (2004), in which the artist interacts with the architecture, the history and the meaning of a site-symbol of Venice - the Punta della Dogana over St. Mark’s Basin. Through a minimal deployment of means, he achieves results of strong scenic impact and transforms the symbolic significance of the place into its semantic modernization.

For various nights, the Golden Globe of the Punta della Dogana pulsed with a red light, transforming the historic node along the trade route of goods and information into an alarm, that is, into a signal of the col-lapse of a mass media communications system which, through its pulsing, signaled its own implosion, while seemingly suffocating any kind of intelligibility. The oscillation between different expressive means seems, at times, to insert itself into a process of creation of different programs. These progressively overlap to develop into works of complex design. Such is the case of Emerging Code - born from the interaction between sculpture and photography. Conceived in 2006, its prodromes rest in a photographic work pro-duced in 1994 for the Gipsoteca di Possagno (Gipsoteca). A long meditation on Canova’s oeuvre, parti-cularly the plaster works, led Morucchio to an aniconic interpretation of these same subjects. The artist concentrates on the points de repère – the means of codification for the transformation of balance and ideal beauty into marble. These points are isolated and developed into the form of round-tipped glass tiles, becoming the base modules for sculptures that are rigorously geometric (Cross Shoots, 2005) or ironically allusive (B[æd] Time, 2009), as well as the constituent elements of more complex sculptural works (Off Shoots, 2006).

Emerging Code is based on the interaction between the sculptures from the Off Shoots series, where the artist’s most frequently used materials - glass and iron - return in a completely personal interpretation of Canova’s callimetry. In this work, the photographic details of the plaster models are digitally manipulated and printed onto silver film (Emerging, 2006). The torsos of the wrestlers Creugante and Damosseno are reddened, emphasizing the contraction of their muscles, thus igniting with a never before seen sensuality. Simultaneously, the extrapolated and isolated masses seem almost introduced to an abstracting process, to which these exponents of the limits of Canovian idealization radically participate until the figurative di-sappears, leaving only the extreme minimal and aniconic reduction of the plaster models. Here, the points de repère, translated into red-orange glass tiles, remain to condense a sort of generative heat - a luminous pulsating power that opens up and overflows, deforming the opaque iron surfaces. The torso returns in the video-performance Sri Yantra (2008), almost like a development in stages: from photography to sculpture, then from sculpture to performance. Using the same frame of the photographs, the artist’s torso is recor-ded as he inhales and exhales to the rhythm of a Tibetan mantra of disarticulated polyphony.

The discourse frequently addressed in his work, through a dualistic view based on antinomic forces and the ambivalence of messages, is rediscovered and exceeded in a synthesis and reunification of likes and opposites: inhalation and exhalation, masculine and feminine, form and inform. Through respiration, the body becomes elastic matter in transformation, spilling over its own limits and losing anatomical barriers: from the division of opposites to the unifying one, returning, perhaps, to a primordial androgyny. The dialo-gue with Canova’s works triggered the photographic series The Main Show (2005), in which the artist ad-dresses spectacularization in the Catholic religion through a sequence of photo frames of the Pietà plaster model. The sculptural group is photographed from slightly different angles in each shot and the close-up horizontal arrangement of the black and white images reproduces the effect of a cinema sequence, restric-ting the frame around the emotional centre of the composition, thus emphasizing the drama of the subject that is, in fact, “staged”. A formation of red frosted blown-glass helmets, produced from the mould of a 14th century sparrow-beaked celata, is arranged on the floor of the hall of the Venetian monastery, as the Laudes Regiae – the incoronation mass chorus from the Bamberg Manuscript (11th century) – plays. The reduced profiles of the Passauer Wolf – emblazoned onto medieval swords – pulsate intermittently on the wall before the helmets.

The wolf alludes to man’s threat to mankind – that seemingly never satisfied instinct to overwhelm and suppress, which makes man oppressor and executioner of himself (homo homini lupus) - throughout the continuity of time and over eternally repeating history. This last attribute is also dealt with in the audio-video projection Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, produced in Venice in 2008 for Holocaust Memorial Day. Dozens of images of the symbols sewn onto clothing to mark Nazi concentration camp interns - Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, prostitutes, Communists – were projected onto the façade of a building in the heart of the city. The six-pointed stars and the different coloured isosceles triangle were reproduced in detail and assembled to recompose an atrocious atlas of the inhumane, of discrimination, and of violence, to the sound of passages from Nono’s Die Ermittlung. Far from the black and white images of historical memory, this patchwork of cloth presents colours, embroideries and weaves that deceives. Appearing almost inno-cuous at first glance, they fascinate and intrigue, just as xenophobia and discrimination continue to exist and increase in appeal.

Particularly in his video works, Morucchio analyzes themes of a strictly social and political nature. At heart are the urgent issues addressed and, for the artist, video seems to be the most incisive and direct me-dium: from Sabato Italiano (2004) to Talk Show (2005), to Tracciati esistenziali (2008) - articulated through the movement of a group of ants used as a metaphor for our thoughtless and hetero-directional paths of existence. Photography remains a fundamental expressive means throughout the artist’s research, both in its connection with other linguistic dimensions, for example in its relationship with sculpture (Emerging Code), as well as in a strictly autonomous sense. A large part of Morucchio’s work, from the 1990s onward, belongs to the latter category, stemming from long and repeated stays in Cuba, Nepal and other places closer to home. His ability to enter into total empathy with different contexts permits him and his lens to introduce a sort of narration, of which the still frame opens up to other real or imaginary, possible or impos-sible stories. All the same, it is never a total “abandon” to the subject, but always an assembly of emotions and conscience, of inside and out. It is always a direct perception of what happens and a rigorous framing of a moment.The strong sense of composition derives from this: the formal and semantic structure of every image, the “narrative structure”, connecting the “signs” and returning to them the possibility of a tale.

The compositional precision, the visual organization, and the strong sense of colour, be it in an emotional or a structural sense, frequently leads to works of an almost pictorial formulation. However, these never lose that fundamental quality of photography - the indexical nature - which Morucchio takes on in a total and absolute way in relation to experience and reality. With an acute and astonished eye, he registers the stuff of daily life. He captures gazes that pierce the distance between the subject and the lens – gazes that unknowingly tell of fragments of lives. Or rather, he freezes situations on the limit of the real, or registers the silent metaphysical stasis of solitary objects and architecture within the scenarios of the urban theatre. The formal and compositional aspects are never disconnected from the content and from the emotional participation of the subject, whether it is a place, an event, a person or a work of art, as in Gypsoteca (1994). In this photographic series produced for the Canovian museum of Possagno, the concentration on sculptural values and the formal relationship between the parts, achieved through measured doses of light and shade, are united by an emotional interpretation of the sculpture itself. Like a slow motion vision, in fact, through the succession of takes based on a progressive gap between frames, the artist manages to concentrate on the emotional and structural “nodes” of his subjects, emphasizing the state of desperation, pain, complicity, and harmony - from the Pietà to Le Grazie, to the Amore e Psiche stanti. Likewise, by means of a sapient use of perspective, he establishes new links and relationships between the sculptures, held tight within the invisible mesh of an alienating silence made of imperceptible dialogues.

SCULPTURE WORKS

Blade series 1999-2000 Wave series 2001-2002

Enlightenments series 2000-2009

Sidenlightenment 2001

Accumulo series 2002-2009

Hyperbolize 2002

Iconoclasm 2003

Cross Shoots series 2005

Offshoots series 2006

B[æ]d Time 2009

Celata series 2007-2009

Passauer Wolf 2007

Signatura Rerum 2006

Vessel 2000-2002

Blade #01, 19997 8

7 8 Blade #02, 1999

Blade #12, 20009 10

9 10Blade #09, 2000

Blade #05, 200011 12

Blade #10, 200013

Wave #02, 200115

Wave #01, 200117 18

17 18Wave #03, 2002

Enlightenment #03, 2000

Enlightenments #07, 2000

Enlightenments #02, 2000

Enlightenments #04. 2000

Enlightenments #06a, 200027 28

27 28 Enlightenments #06b, 2000

Enlightenments #13, 200829 30

Enlightenments #05, 2000Museo del Vetro, Murano

Sidenlightenment #01, 200135 36

Accumulo #01, 200237 38

37 38 Accumulo #02, 2002

Accumulo #03, 200539 40

39 40 Accumulo #04, 2009

Hyperbolize, 200241 42

Iconoclasm #01, 200345

Cross Shoots #02, 2005

Cross Shoots #01, 2005

51 Offshoots #07 2006

54 Offshoots #04, 2006

Offshoots #09, 2006

58 B[æ]d Time, 2009

Celata series #02, 2009

Celata series #01, 2007

64Passauer Wolf, 2007

Signatura Rerum, 2006

Vessel #00, 2002

Vessel #05, 2000

Vessel #01, 2000

Vessel #03, 2000

Blade is a series of frosted glass sculptures supported by elliptical iron segments. Seemingly frozen, they appear to glide, suspended in a balanced tension between the forces of attraction and repulsion, or rather, blocked by the weight and the fixedness of the iron structures holding them, blocked by the weight and the fixity of the iron structures containing the “mobility” of the glass element. Blade #01 1999, black and red ground glass, 46 x 4.5 x 8.5 cm - forged iron stand, 43 x 10 x 20 cm Blade #02 1999, red and crystal ground glass, 53 x 6.5 x 10 cm - polished iron stand, 48.5 x 13.5 x 28 cm Blade #05 2000, white and crystal ground glass, 48.5 x 5.5 x 7,5 cm - forged iron structure, 46 x 9.6 x 12.5 cmBlade #09 2000, ground crystal glass, bronze flakes, 56.5 x 6.3 x 12 cm - iron stand, 49.6 x 13.8 x 26.6 cm Blade #10 2000, yellow ground glass, 51.9 x 5.4 x 11.5 cm - forged iron structure, 42.9 x 11 x 20 cm Blade #12 2000, orange ground glass 53.5 x 5.5 x 10 cm - iron stand, 49.5 x 14 x 26.5 cm

Wave is composed of a curvilinear glass element whose extremities are inserted into a vertical structure of iron or steel. Though elementary and almost two-dimensional, the immobilized bent form seems to “pulsate” with plasticity, frozen in a forward thrust.Wave #01 2001, ground red and crystal glass, 54.5 x 6 x 19.5 cm - steel stand, 73 x 14 x 18.5 cm Wave #02 2001, ground crystal glass, 72 x 8 x 21 cm - steel stand, 85 x 20 x 25 cmWave #03 2002, ground black and crystal glass, 67 x 87 x 230 cm - iron stand, 88 x 15 x 30 cm

The Enlightenments series enacts a dynamic tension between opposites: the physical and symbolic antithesis of materials, here, iron and glass. Glass points break through iron barriers, crossing potentially infinite trajectories. Thus, they present themselves almost as obstacles to rationality - a paradox, a koan, foreseer of possible and further “openings” and enlightenments…Enlightenments #04 2000, forged iron structure, 5 blown and ground crystal elements, 100 x 106.5 x 106.5 cmEnlightenments #06b 2000, forged iron structure, 3 blown and ground crystal glass elements, 95 x 40 x 28 cm Enlightenments #06a 2000, forged iron structure, 3 blown and ground black glass elements, 95 x 40 x 28 cmEnlightenment #12 2009, forged iron structure, 1 blown and ground black glass element, 65 x 40 x 13 cmEnlightenments #13 2009, forged iron structure, 2 blown and ground crystal glass elements, 110 x 40 x 11.5 cmEnlightenment #03 2000, forged iron structure, 1 blown and ground crystal element, 41 x 45 x 13 cmEnlightenment #08 2003, forged iron structure, 1 blown and ground crystal element, 25 x 40 x 18 cmEnlightenments #02 2000, forged iron structure, 2 blown and ground orange glass elements, 51 x 40 x 12 cmEnlightenments #05 2000, forged iron structure, 7 blown and ground crystal elements, 220 x 40 x 40 cm

In Sidenlightenment - the antithetical relationship between iron and glass, present in the Enlightenments series, resolves itself in a formal geometric synthesis. Here the iron loses its plasticity and the glass spire traces its own linear projection, opening up a horizontal breech in the metallic structure into which it inserts itself and simultaneously dematerializes, confounding itself with the empty space.Sidenlightenment #01 2001, forged iron structure, 1 blown, ground crystal glass element, 33 x 132 x 5 cm

Accumulo is part of a sculptural series composed of bundles of groundglass javelins or lances, supporting each other on their extremities. A rubber band wraps around them, holding them together at their centre. The elements are inclined and rotated, bearing each other until they reach a position that consents structural stability.Accumulo #01 2002, 3 ground crystal glass elements, rubber, 185 x 60 x 60 cmAccumulo #02 2002, 3 ground blue crystal glass elements, rubber, 90 x 30 x 30 cmAccumulo #03 2005, 3 ground black, crystal glass elements, rubber, 110 x 35 x 35 cm Accumulo #04 2009, 4 ground black, crystal glass elements, rubber, 90 x 35 x 35 cm

Hyperbolize is a “variable” work composed of a sequence of curved sandblasted crystal glass pieces shaped to form hyperbolas; their extremities resting on vertical and horizontal planes. The set of elements “trace” a path of light between the intersecting planes, stimulating new perceptions of the spaces in-between.Hyperbolize 2002, 8 bent, frosted crystal glass elements, 72 x 22 x 7 cm each

Iconoclasm’s structural form - of frosted and curved crystal glass - betrays the symbol of which it is the incomplete expression – the swastika. The force of this archetype is so deeply rooted in popular “visual sentiment” that, despite being deconstructed and reduced to an enigmatic linear structure, it nonethe-less appeals to the observer’s conscience. The choice of semi-transparent crystal glass is based on the material’s ability to absorb light, imprisoning it and making it its essence. It therefore becomes the very metaphor for the attraction that Totalitarian ideologies exert on the masses, fascinating them and absor-bing every individuality. Just as such forms of total self-manifestation need light, which attracts, capture and contains, likewise, Totalitarian regimes - in certain historic moments - have attracted and absorbed the masses - an essential element of their very existence.Iconoclasm #01 2003, bent, frosted crystal glass, 41 x 92 x 5.5 cm

Cross Shoots is composed of thirteen black frosted and molded glass elements fixed on a wooden cross structure. The first plastic formulation originated in relation to Canova’s oeuvre and was subse-quently elaborated in the Off Shoots sculptural series.Cross_Shoots #01 2005, 13 cast, ground, frosted black glass elements, painted wood, 80 x 80 x 7 cmCross_Shoots #02 2005, 13 cast, ground, frosted crystal glass elements, painted wood, 80 x 80 x 7 cm

The Offshoots sculpture series was conceived for the Emerging Code exhibition project (Hobart, Berlin 2006). It was exhibited together with the silver prints of the digitally worked images reproducing parts of Antonio Canova’s plaster models, preserved in the Possagno Gipsoteca. These sculptures are compo-sed of forged and pierced iron surfaces, whose holes are “filled” with red-orange semi-transparent and sandblasted glass elements. These are interpreted as three-dimensional transpositions of the points de repère (reference points) constellating Canova’s plasters – points which “codify” classical beauty - used to translate proportions and dimensions of the original plaster models into marble. The sculptural works, in synergy with the images drawn from Canova’s models, participate in an abstract process of transpo-sition of neo-Classical beauty, where the codes, though reduced to an aniconic and tapered solution of minimal formal and expressive terms, seem to preserve the trace of a deep sensuality.Offshoots #07 2006, forged iron structure, 8 cast, ground, frosted red-yellow glass elements, 96 x 128 x 40 cmOffshoots #10 2006, forged iron structure, 6 cast, ground, frosted red-yellow glass elements, 90.5 x 51 x 18 cmOffshoots #04 2006, forged iron structure, 3 cast, ground, frosted red-yellow glass elements, 76 x 30 x 15 cmOffshoots #08 2006, forged iron structure, 2 cast, ground, frosted red-yellow glass elements, 50 x 51 x19Offshoots #09 2006, forged iron structure, 4 cast, ground, frosted red-yellow glass elements, 70.5 x 52 x 18 cm

The thirty-six black frosted glass elements which constitute B[æ]d Time are arranged in four rows and accompanied by a black velvet cushion. The title ironically plays on the phonetic transcription of the adjective “bad” and the noun “bed”, represented by the sculpture.B[æ]d Time 2009, 36 cast, ground, frosted black glass elements, treated velvet pillow, 122 x 44 x 5 cm

The blown glass sculpture Celata forms the base of the Laudes Regiae installation project, conceived for the ex Convento dei Santi Cosma e Damiano on the Giudecca Island (Venice). The work was produced using a specifically designed mold of the so-called Elmo di Attila, a 14th century sparrow-beaked celata belonging to the Armeria Collection in the Doge’s Palace in Venice. The helmet, due to its radically essen-tial, almost primitive, formal enunciation, is interpreted as a trans-cultural and trans-epochal image and, therefore used as a metaphor for repeating returns or unchanging conditions, beyond the times and places of historic advance.Celata series #01 2007, blown, cast, frosted red glass, 44 x 35 x 30 cmCelata series #02 2009, blown, cast, frosted black glass, 44 x 35 x 30 cm

Passauer Wolf is composed of a single red frosted glass tile heat-pressed with the image of the Passauer Wolf - the effigy-brand that was punched into the swords produced in the Medieval German town bearing the same name. The image, of an elementary formal solution, represents the wolf in running position. The Passauer Wolf, integral element of the Laudes Regiae installation was exhibited in the holy water stoop of the ex Convento dei Santi Cosma e Damiano on the Giudecca.Passauer Wolf 2007, frosted red glass, 50 x 18 x 2 cm

The frosted glass tiles of Signatura Rerum, produced in three specimens, have been cast from a mold of red thorns collected from a tree on Murano. Like fossils, they seem to foster the form, volume, and memory of a living organism.Signatura Rerum 2006, 3 cast, ground, frosted red-yellow glass elements, hemp, 14 x 5.5 x 0.8 cm each

Vessel is a series of glass vases of sinuous and asymmetrical forms, obtained through the process of blowing glass into a wooden mold. Each of the five works is different in colour and composition. Bronze leaves, iron filaments, and particular pigments have also been applied. A stone specimen was produced on the occasion of the Vasi Comunicanti exhibition (2002).Vessel #00 2002, carved stone, 61.5 x 20 x 17 cmVessel #05 2000, blown, cast, ground crystal glass, iron wire, 62 x 21 x 17.5 cmVessel #06 2000, blown, cast, ground white glass, iron wire, 63 x 21.5 x 17.5 cmVessel #03 2000, blown, cast, ground crystal glass, bronze flakes, 63 x 21 x 18 cm

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SCULPTURE & PRINT SOLO, GROUP SHOWS

Dinamiche, 2000 - solo show - Galleria Rossella Junck, Venezia

Fragile Beauty, 2001 - group show - Marco Polo Glass Gallery, Murano, Venezia

Il Lento Procedere, 2001 - group show - Schola dei Tiraoro e Battioro, Venezia

Opera Buona, 2002 - group show - Chiostri Benedettini di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia

Vasi Comunicanti, 2002 - group show - Palazzo Mutilati, Verona

Fragile!, 2003 - group show - Chiesa San Samuele, Venezia

Isola Luminosa, 2003 - group show - Despard Gallery, Hobart

Cool!, 2004 - group show - Primio Piano Gallery, Lecce

10+4 Days on the Island, 2004 - group show - Despard Gallery, Hobart

Emerging Code, 2006 - solo show - Galerie R. Junck, Berlin - Despard Gallery, Hobart

Glassdressing, 2006 - group show - Museo di Cà Rezzonico, Venezia

Julutstallning, 2007 - group show - Utställningssalongen Gallery, Stockholm

Notturni Dannunziani, 2008 - group show - Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia

Mari Contro Mari, 2008 - group show - Galata Museo del Mare, Genova

1 Floor, 2009 - group show - Liassidi Palace, Venezia

Mari Contro Mari, 2009 - group show - Archivio Storico, Pisa

Dinamiche - solo show - Galleria Rossella Junck, Venezia 04.07_15.08 2000curated by A. Pagnes

Andrea Morucchio began with his own exhibition Dinamiche at Rossella Junck Gallery in which he presen-ted glass and iron sculptures from the series Blade and Enlightenments and some glass Vases from the Vessel series. For this exhibition the video Dynamo was produced, made by the montage of more than one hundred photographs treating the moments of production of works.

The series of immobile glass Blades represent the starting point from which my sculptural research re-garding spiritual dynamism develops. Blade, as a clarifying element of my tumultuous creative impulse, represents the thought that introduces light, and then splits in two leading to synthesis.

The visual projection of the Blade essence is a simple glass point that pierces iron barriers, traveling on horizontal lines creating Enlightenments. Enlightenments are structures that freeze a “continuous occur-rence”; there are no physical expedients to underline the kinetic spirit of the works and yet, I think, these works communicate a strong dynamic charge.

Inserting the glass points in iron holes make me feel that the physical and symbolic contrast between glass and iron creates a process of vibrations by which the sculpture is charged with spiritual, dynamic energy.

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Dinamiche, 2000, Galleria Rossella Junck, Venezia, works exposed: Blade, Enlightenments, Vessel series 23 sculptures in forged iron, blown, cast, ground glass, Dynamo vhs video monitor, sound 80

Dinamiche - catalogue text by Andrea Pagnes, Dinamiche, Galleria Rossella Junck, Venezia 2000

To link history and the history of culture with daily experience, to achieve coexistence between an artisan-work and the conceptual and technological sophistications of our modern times is not an easy task, but nonetheless an interesting one. If the final result of such an approach can maintain the fascination of several past meanings and - at the same time - express a strong, innovative tension, then it is easier to understand why some artists differ from others. This being that they are able to affirm both a particular, individual creative autonomy, and an investigation of semantic formal values capable of bestowing on their art works a certain aesthetic dignity. This is the case of A.M., sculptor, in his debut in the new gallery of Rossella Junck.

For many years now A.M. has worked as a photographer specializing in ancient and modern glass sculp-tures. He is a perfectionist which has enabled him to widen his knowledge of this material in all its several aspects: from the ancient techniques of blowing to the various project-phases, from the work in the furna-ces to the documentation of many exhibitions in museums and galleries. In his photographic work, he was deeply attracted by the inner mutability of glass sculptures, revealed by the different kind of light incidence, background, and context he chose to use.

Constantly sought after for his originality and professional skills, A.M. was soon in touch with some of the industry’s best glass designers, which led to the almost automatic step from the conceptive image of other artists’ glass works to the design of his own. As a photographer he worked to obtain reproductions of glass sculptures that were never just simple means of objective communication, but rather involved images of what sculptures emanate. The eventual overcoming of this apparent contradiction between the imperatives of of objectivity and interpretation has become the fundamental principle of his artistic research. A research that has transformed into a pure aesthetic investigation of the material: glass.

The rigorous and extreme forms he has created represent a break with the traditional ways of Murano glass manufacturing even though he utilises the most common techniques and glass types. Experimenting with the material casuality caused by different glass lifting and removing techniques, obtaining informal organicity within the rigid, ordered, geometric form achieved by an extreme glass grinding technique, reveals A.M.’s will to work the glass as a noble material, and not as an imitation or a pretext to reach pre-established, unemotional, objective aims where artistic value can often be missing.

A.M.’s approach to glass - a thoroughly mental approach - is to intuit the expressive possibilities of glass as a material for sculpture, whether he outlines it in a formal representation or translates it into symbolic narration. To assemble glass with a contrasting material such as iron gives the onlooker a sensation of being in front of ritual, evocative objects, characterized by a remote, austere holiness.

Due to his serious approach, the originality of A.M.’s sculptures derives from his ability to circumscribe the design to the inner and natural characteristics of the material he has chosen to use. The same undoubted strength and elegance of his pieces comes from the artist’s natural tendency to rigour and discipline. In these sculptures the relationship between glass and iron is almost epiphanic. They don’t look like pure objects but rather subjects capable of expressing their own manifestation and appearance.

For A.M. it seems particularly important to show his art works not only in situations distinguished by pure aesthetical pleasure but also to turn them into open confrontations dealing with problems strictly ingrained in the ethics of making. Andrea pays strict attention to the presence of man as an observer in today’s world. The video Dynamo - which he has expressly made for this exhibition - is a clear example of the above. Star-ting from the assumption that today’s Man phagocytizes images without being able anymore to perceive their meaning - and this is not a problem that regards the images themselves, but rather a problem con-nected to how Man uses and proposes them - Andrea has conceived an operation based on the attempt to restore to the image its rightful communicative value. It was not easy to make this experimental video.

Today images are unable to communicate. They just inform. They recycle themselves. They contaminate and replicate themselves superficially. They clone themselves at a chaotic speed. They don’t allow space for any reflection or consideration. Their content is swallowed by the exasperated, disorganized rapidity with which they follow each other. To reconcile the video-image with an appropriate context, and give it the possibility to become a depositary expression of content and context like the one mentioned above, is an operation aimed at focusing on the image that can become - and remain - a document for fruition, and not just a vulgar element of consumption or seduction. Blades and Metal.

The first impression I had of A.M.’s sculptures was that of participating in conversation with something that was coming from an abstract and remote distance. Ineffable, mysterious. Something ingrained in the reminiscence capable of maintaining all the characteristics and the attributes of a contemporary art work. I had the sensation of being inside a dark photographic chamber, waiting for the image to appear on paper. While staring at the dynamism of his glass blades, with their peculiar quality of cutting the motionless, inert space and of incising the void, I asked myself if there was something else beyond the formal elaboration that is the dominant factor of all plastic art investigation.Then I had to ask myself if there were any other reasons that had pushed him to express something beyond the ordinary experimentation of the fusion and grinding of glass.

Obviously there was something else. An attempt to give the object-sculpture semantic values capable of profusing a sort of aura, in order to confirm an artistic dignity that is often lost because of a superficial over-emphasis of decoration due to a lack of intention. It is clear that with A.M.’s sculptures the blade is the fundamental element, the icon of his universe. This element is the one that characterises them and affirms their unicity. Since ancient times, the blade has been identified as a symbol of penetration and ope-ning. The wound - the spot in which the blade goes through - is a light. In alchemy, the blade represents the thought that introduces the light, and the organ of creation that opens to fecundate and split in two to permit the synthesis. The blade is the shaft of light that illuminates and opens a closed space.

It is the sun-ray, the fertilizing element that splits images, without confusing them and reducing them to a level of pure abstraction. Nevertheless, to understand the reason for his formal choice I thought it was ne-cessary to go back and sift through symbolic meaning. Since ancient times, the blade has been identified as a symbol of penetration and opening. The wound - the spot in which the blade goes through - is a light. In alchemy, the blade represents the thought that introduces the light, and the organ of creation that opens to fecundate and split in two to permit the synthesis.

When they follow a linear direction, they are connected to the symbols of horizontality and they express a truthfulness that is totally aerial like their own trajectory. To challenge gravity means - symbolically - to realize freedom from mundane conditions.

Of course, what I have written in the previous paragraph has relative value to A.M.’s sculptures. Neverthe-less, independently of those scholarly considerations, if we watch carefully how he assembles them, it ap-pears that they assume a particular function: his sculptures become catalysts and vectors of energy. They virtually exercise an influx of attraction, conduction and coordination that is consequent in their settings. I have to admit that my analysis is maybe spoiled by a certain interpretative enthusiasm. Nevertheless, the long friendship between A.M. and myself allows me to point out in his art work certain concepts that cha-racterize speculative investigation, concepts that also belong to his way of being and thinking.

The way A.M. assembles his sculptures represents the overcoming of prosaic conditions, an imaginary freedom from distance and boredom: a mental anticipation regarding the conquest of an exceptional gift. A gift that could be comparable with the end of ambivalence, projection split in two, objectivation, choice and oriented time. A.M. sets his blades in the same direction as one who searches for his identity, individuality and personality. His sculptures unify decision, unification, synthesis. They become symbols of rapid intui-tion, knowledge and perception. In them speed and rectitude are correctly unified, allowing representation to assume a dynamic sense rather than a formal one.

The blade is the shaft of light that illuminates and opens a closed space. It is the sun-ray, the fertilizing element that splits images, without confusing them and reducing them to a level of pure abstraction.

Which other material better than glass - characterized by the laws of transparency, luminousity and pu-reness - could allow a work of aesthetic investigation based on the dynamics of light to function? Some of A.M.’s blades seem to be at a standstill, directed downwards. Others seem to be moving, destined to transfix a goal. Like the stair the blade is also a symbol of the exchange between sky and earth. When it is directed downwards, the blade becomes an attribute of divine power, like primitive lightning, a ray of light or fecundating rain. In some mythological tales the human beings that gods utilised to fulfil their wishes were called “the quivered sons”.

For this reason the blade became the symbol of destiny with its flashing and sudden fulfilment, but it was also the symbol of love because of the phallic form it portrayed. A blade penetrates the center like the male element penetrates the female element unifying themselves in ying and yang. Mystically it is the same be-cause they represent a union, a divine answer to the questions of mankind. A clear example of this is found in the art of interpreting the shooting of an arrow - a practice still in use among some Arab tribes. When the blades are directed upwards, they are connected to the symbols of verticality.

A.M.’s glassworks vary in their aspects due to the different reflections and incidences of light, appearing to manifest a constant intervention of forces. A.M. uses metal not only as a support but as an integral structure for his sculptures. The noun metal derives from the noun Me or Mes: the ancient noun Man gave to the moon.

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It is known that the moon doesn’t have its own light. Its light comes from the reflection of the sun-rays. The moon sets its configuration as a symbol - of periodicity and renewal, of transformation and growth, of pas-sing of time, of inderect, progressive and cold knowledge, of the dreaming and the unconscious - against the linearity of the sun-rays.

In this way the glass blades assume qualities of a pure element that frees itself from the unrefined mineral, a metaphor for the spirit that frees itself from the substance to become visibile. If we consider what spiritua-lity is in art, the beneficial aspect of this spiritual tension will be based on the purification and the transmu-tation, but also on the cosmological function of the transformer. All metals are subject to transformations. In alchemy the aim of these transformations is to take away the breath leaving absolute pureness.

The fusion of the metals - and the glass - is comparable to death. The breath is comparable to virtue: the nucleus and spirit of the matter. In fact, once they are settled inside the metal A.M.’s blades seem to some-how free themselves from the metal detaching themselves from every material good and prejudice to affirm their own will and recover the original innocence. In the end it seems that they almost try to circumscribe a continuous founding and reforming.

Therefore even the choice of the iron has its own importance or role. Iron corresponds to the planet Mars: it is the more appropriate metal to describe this tension of the opposites. Iron is strong, hard, stubborn, rigorous, inflexible, even if all these qualities don’t fully belong to its real characteristics. A metal that has holy and profane values. Its origin could be meteoritic, celestial, as it could be terrestrial, embryonal. But of all the metals it is the most impure and obscure; in apparent contraddiction with life. It gives shelter, but at the same time can be deadly. Metaphorically, the transformation of the matter can only take place with the aid of a sharp tool, clearly antithetical. A sharp tool - while indicating the passage from what is known to what is unknown - measures the time of history.

Fragile Beauty - group show - curated by Giovanni Iovane, Marco Polo Glass Gallery, Murano, Venezia 07.09_20.11.2001 work exposed: Sidenlightenment, 1 sculpture in blown, cast, ground glass, forged iron 33 x 132 x 5 cm

Il Lento Procedere - group show - curated by E. Capitanio & P. Vincenzi, Schola dei Tiraoro e Battioro, Venezia 12.10_25.10 2001works exposed: Blade, Enlightenments series, 4 sculptures in forged iron, blown, cast, ground glass

Opera Buona - group show - curated by M. Paderni, Chiostri Benedettini di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia 25.05_09.06.2002works exposed: Enlightenments series, 3 sculptures in blown cast and ground glass, forged iron

Fragile! - group show - curated by Attilia Dorigato, Chiesa San Samuele, Venezia 06.06_31.07 2003work exposed: Enlightenments #7, 1 sculpture in blown cast and ground glass, forged iron 67 x 44 x 11 cm

Vasi Comunicanti - group show - curated by R. Bianconi & A. Pagnes, Palazzo Mutilati, Verona 19.09_20.10 2002 works exposed: Vessels #00, 2 elements in ground stone, blown ground glass, iron threads 62 X 22 X 18 cm each

Isola Luminosa - group show - Despard Gallery, Hobart 28.03_30.04 2003works exposed: Blade, Enlightenments, Accumulo, Wave, Hyperbolize, Vessel series, blown, cast, ground glass, forged iron, rubber

Isola Luminosa - group show - Despard Gallery, Hobart 28.03_30.04 2003works exposed: Blade, Enlightenments, Accumulo, Wave, Hyperbolize, Vessel series, blown, cast, ground glass, forged iron, rubber

Cool - group show - curated by Dores Sacquegna Primio Piano Gallery, Lecce 30.10_10.11 2004work exposed: Accumulo #02, 3 ground blue, cristal glass elements, rubber, 90 x 30 x 30 cm

10+4 Days on the Island - group show - Despard Gallery, Hobart 31.03_13.04 2005works exposed: Percer_Voir, blown, ground, satin glass elements, Cross Shoots ground glass, wood, Gipsoteca series, b/w inkjet prints

Emerging Code - solo show - Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin, 02.06_22.07 2006Emerging Code - solo show - Despard Gallery, Hobart, 10.03_08.04 2006

Emerging Code, Andrea Morucchio interpreted Antonio Canova at Despard Gallery, Hobart, Australia and Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin, Germany. These major solo exhibition projects incorporated the Offshots sculpture series, made of forged and pierced iron sheets with the openings filled with semi-transparent red satin glass elements and the silver prints from the Emerging series reproducing Antonio Canova’s neo classical plaster figurative sculptures.

I consider the glass elements as a three-dimensional transfiguration of the small bronze points on Canova’s sculptures; the points, which “codify” Classical beauty, were used by Canova to reproduce in marble the proportions and sizes of the original plaster model.

I see these plastic works, in combination with the enhanced human figure photos, as an abstract transposition of figurative Neo-Classical beauty. An abstract, minimal and rough expression of a code that discloses a deeper beauty; an exercise in reducing the Neo-Classical figurative sculptures to minimal expressive terms.

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Emerging Code, 2006, Galerie R. Junck, Berlin, works exposed: Emerging series, 6 inkjet silver polyester films prints on alluminiumOffshots series, 4 sculptures in forged iron, cast, ground, satin glass elements

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Emerging Code, 2006, Despard Gallery, Hobart, works exposed: Emerging series, 9 inkjet silver polyester films prints on alluminiumOffshots series, 7 sculptures in forged iron and cast, ground, satin glass elements 102

Sampling Canova - catalogue text by Marco Baravalle, Emerging Code, Despard Gallery, Hobart 2006 Emerging Code lends itself to a double interpretation. The first, and most direct one being the attempt to clarify its relationship with the original work by Canova. In this case we can stress how the development of Canova’s work, from plaster to marble, is in fact a path from material - which instigates violent emotions - to sentiment, and finally to thought: a true and proper process of abstraction, so manifest in the combination, which A. M. choses to set up, of the photos of the Possagno plasters and his sculptural installation.

One could compare the frontal bidimensionality of the pyramid of the monument to Maria Christina of Austria, with its door suggesting the dark and subterranean space of the Ade, to the bidimesionality of the Offshoots, with their gashes that, in the same way, suggest to us the existence of a space, though by no means supernatural. And so on. The second possible interpretation, perhaps not so direct, but nonetheless evident, is the one that choses to emphasize the postproduction quality of a work such as Emerging Code.The key would thus not be a critical reading of the artistic reworking put in practise by A. M., but rather the fact that the artist has chosen pre-existing pieces as the point of departure for his own work. Since the debut of the readymade, the artist who no longer creates ex-novo has become one of the constants of contemporaneity, a possible common denominator from which to perceive the art of the last century. The artist is ever increasingly appreciated for his skills as a sampler, as a recombiner of cultural production, be it artistic, popular, or media based, etc.

This perspective, thus does not look toward, if not as an academic exercise, the historico-artistic and critical reconstruction of a d’apres. The history of art risks being interpreted as a confused and indistinct mixture of forms from which to draw upon without much care. And yet, no one intends to affirm that one singular truth of a work exists, this is decided neither once and for all nor for everyone, not by the author or the critic, nor by the public. All of these components continuously reshape the meaning of the work. Every work can be taken up, reworked, modified, destroyed, put back together again, mocked and, at worst, betrayed. The problem arises when from the possibility of betrayal, one passes to the ideology of betrayal, of which the most fatal effect is that of the total emptying of sense and of the depletion of every critical inclination of the work of art.

Emerging Code cannot be explained as détournement, since détournement was a situationist invention used as a weapon against the alienation of capitalist society, a weapon which A.M., nonetheless, knows very well given his parallel production characterized by the confrontation of social themes and by artistic dynamics more markedly relational - see. Petrologiche -. All the same, Emerging Code cannot be fully understood in its critical relationship with Canovian sculpture. It is postproduction and appropriation, but it is, at the same time, sculpture - though bidimensional - to be read through the traditional categories of material, form, volume and colour.

Emerging Code is sampling and reworking, but all the same, one can sense its formal relationship with its historico-critical antecedents, from Canova, to Informalism - understood in its material declension -, to Lucio Fontana who, through his razor slashes, wished to suggest a three-dimensional space beyond the canvas, just as the gashes in A.M.’s iron are not empty, but teeming with the life of the incandescent glass pushing to break out, seem to give ideal depth and solidity to the space before them, thus making the spectator conscious of that very spatial substance.

Red Thread - catalogue text by Saverio Simi De Burgis, Emerging Code, Despard Gallery, Hobart 2006

There is a red thread which ties together the recent interventions of A. M. In fact, Red is a constant refe-rence in all of his latest production. See Pulse Red, Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno, and now Emerging Code. Red is the colour of suffering and of sacrifice, but it also the colour of revolution. In any case, one senses a strong connection to the city and to its history in the work of the Venetian artist, a bond that is not to be understood as banal rhetorical value, but rather as a will turned towards a reunion with the city’s archetype, now lost due to the harmful pillaging perpetrated in an ever more distorted context;

it deals with a primary vocation to be complied with in order to reconvert, in a clear-cut inversion of trend, the evident ruinous urban decline of the natural equilibrium of the gens who have chosen to live in this place. Unde origo inde salus, where there is origin, there is also health and salvation: this inscription, sur-rounded by a crown of roses on a circular metal plaque, lies in the centre of the pavement of the octagonal plan of the church of Santa Maria della Salute of Venice.

This is the primary vocation that A.M. wishes to repropose in a contemporary context, with a significance that is not only of an aesthetic character, but is also ethical, social and political. The Venetian artist initiated Pulse Red, 2004, an intervention using intermittent red lights, from the ideal and propulsive centre of the lagoon city, from its omphalós which coincides with the Basin of Saint Mark, where the point of the Dogana wedges itself into the opposite flat surface, so significant in the seafairing tradition which is still felt by the inhabitants of the city. This prenetration seems to anticipate the constructivist and propagandist solutions of El Lissitzky, Beat the white with the red wedge. In Pulse Red the object of the intervention is Golden Globe supported by Atlas and mounted by the icon of fortune.

In Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno / Our Ideas Will Triumph 2002 A.M. structured his video sound intervention in the red room of the Palazzo Mocenigo drawing inspiration from a painting which illustrates the pirate ambush against the ship commanded by Mocenigo. Mocenigo chose to have his vessel explode rather than surrender to his enemies. A.M. plays on the obvious reference to the contemporary sacrifice of the kamikaze, which is guided by exasperation and fanaticism.

In the current proposal Emerging Code, A.M. continues on the trail of historic references. He draws inspiration from photographs of the plasters of Antonio Canova taken in 1994 at Possagno. The dotted surfaces of Canova’s plasters provoked in A.M. a series of considerations. For A.M., Canova’s plasters represent the artist’s sensual will to arrive at a concept of absolute beauty, following the codes and canons of classical Greek sculpture. Winckelmann’s aesthetic concepts of the ideal values of the Greek artistic tradition, identifiable in the cult of the nude male body, were reproposed by Canova in his plasters, which through a system of small points permitted the transposition of the sculptural forms from plaster into the most noble marble of Carrara. In the partial images of the bodies, reproduced predominantly in an orange-red hue, A. M., with this awareness, resumes the necessity to propose an ideal beauty.

His works in iron within which breasts, shoots or better yet, offshoots of glass emerge, are also to be understood in such an accesion. In them, we recall Canova’s point system, so densely present in his plasters. In this way, the artist wishes to propose a renewed concept of beauty to be exported, thus supporting the primary vocation of the city in which he has been working for years.

Morucchio interprets Canova - catalogue text by Noel Frankham Emerging Code, Despard Gallery, Hobart 2006

I was extremely fortunate to be in Venice in September 1992 while the exhibition, Antonio Canova, was showing at the Museo Correr. The museum itself is an awe-inspiring example of design and construction with vast halls, columns and rooms – hard surfaces of stone, marble and plaster – ideally suited to Cano-va’s marble sculpture. Canova (1757-1822) was possibly one of the most accomplished and certainly the most famous sculptor of the Neoclassical movement.

With his roots in the late Baroque and Greek Classicism, by 1800 Canova had produced funerary works commemorating major figures of his time, Pope Clement IV, Maria Christina of Austria. His portraits of members of Bonaparte and Borghese family members demonstrate, exquisite refinement of conception, touch, and sensibility… the result of a long process of abstraction from the vigour and passion of his first drawings and sketch models: the marble works were mainly carved by assistants from full-sized plaster models… (M. Jordan, Antonio Canova, Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).

Canova was heavily influenced and inspired by Winckelmann’s Neoclassical creed demanding a, smooth, calm sculpture with closed compact outlines. (A. Potts, J.J. Winckelmann, Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). Born in Possagno near Venice, Canova established his career in Rome, undertaking commissions throughout Europe. Canova retired to Possagno, where he built, a circular Neoclassical church… [that] serves as his mausoleum…( M. Jordan, Antonio Canova). The nearby Gipsoteca Canoviana houses his drawings and terracotta and plaster models. The plaster models were constructed from drawings scaled up by implan-ting hundreds of nails within the plaster to provide reference points for the work’s evolution into marble. The transformative process – drawing to plaster – to marble – mirrored that of Neoclassicism’s ambition to transcend the purely functional in a search for perfection, ideal beauty.

Morucchio shares Canova’s aspiration to reach beyond corporeal limitations towards the spiritual. Where Canova used the human body as his means of transformation – A.M. uses Canova’s models. Morucchio photographed the Canova plaster models in 1994, captivated by their beauty and by the embedded re-ference points appearing as black dot grids on the skin. Honouring Canova’s process of abstraction and transformation, Morucchio extends the metaphor through digital manipulation creating a suite of images that in turn have been further transformed and abstracted into metal and glass sculptures.

Where Canova used the points in plaster as a practical device to control the transformation of his drawn images into an enlarged three-dimensional marble form, Morucchio uses the points as a basis for a pro-cess of abstraction through which he exalts physical sensuality and emotional tension. (A. Morucchio, 6 January 2006) The ‘point’ - of departure, realization, enlightenment - also featured in Morucchio’s 2003 exhibitions during Ten Days on the Island. In Tasmania as the inaugural Alcorso Foundation artist in resident at the Tasmanian School of Art, A. M. developed three complementary exhibitions: Percer_Voir at the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens; Eidetic Bush, Plimsoll Gallery; and Isola Luminosa at Despard Gallery. Work in each exhibition created moments of tension, piercings, intersections through which the viewer might be free to imagine, perceive, and reflect – beyond the strictures of daily life. 110

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A.M. also exhibited a selection of work at Despard gallery in 2005. Residency programs are crucial oppor-tunities for artists to extend and test their practices in new environments, and to interact with new creative communities. A.M. was an especially generous and engaged visitor to Tasmania. The three exhibitions developed during his three months here in early 2003 are evidence of the commitment Andrea made to Tasmania, and the influence Tasmania had on his creative development. It is particularly pleasing for tho-se who supported his 2003 residency to have Andrea return in 2006. The new work clearly builds on the ideas that underpinned his 2003 work, and like that work demonstrates his sensitivity to materials, form and colour.

The work in this current exhibition reveals a quite fine sensibility, conceptual and material, presenting the-matically and formally unified body of work. Light, shadow, satin-like texture and surface and the colour red extend two and three dimensional forms and elaborate the concept of idealised beauty as homage to Canova but equally revealing A.M.’s own creative drivers of insight, purity of perception, his use of tension and dynamism, and his control of image, glass and metal.

Notturni Dannunziani - group show - curated by M. Riccioni, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia 29.08_06.09.2008works exposed: Offshots #10, forged iron, ground satin glass 90,5 x 51 x 18 cm, Emerging series, 3 inkjet prints on pvc 110 x 85 cm each

Julutstallning - group show - Utställningssalongen Gallery, Stockholm 20.12 2006_19.01 2007works exposed: Offshots #9, 1 sculpture in forged iron, cast, ground, satin glass elements, 70.5 x 52 x 18 cm Emerging series, 4 inkjet silver polyester film prints on alluminium 90 x 75 cm each

Glassdressing - group show - curated by Giuliana Carbi, Museo di Cà Rezzonico, Venezia 09.09_09.10 2006work exposed: Signatura Rerum, 3 elements in cast, ground, satin glass, hemp thread 14 x 5,5 x 0,8 cm each

Mari Contro Mari - group show - curated by Nues.pro, Galata Museo del Mare, Genova 04.06_06.07 2008work exposed: Laudes Regiae, 4 inkjet silver polyester film prints on alluminium, cm 50 x 37,50 each

1st Floor, F. Bianco, Interno3, A. Morucchio - group show - Liassidi Palace, Venezia 04.06_08.11 2009curated by Laura Poletto

1st Floor, extract pubblication text by Laura Poletto, Venezia 2009

1st Floor literally denotes a place: it is a space where artists who are engaged on different conceptual fronts have placed themselves in relation with one another, indicating autonomous creative paths within the context of contemporary artistic production via different linguistic modes, including painting, sculptural installation and audio-video works. [.....]

In Andrea Morucchio’s works, the reasons of form interweave with and are inseparably balanced by the concepts, these being of a spiritual, cultural or sociopolitical nature. Tension - the dynamic relationship between opposites - is one of the fundamental aspects of his sculptures, which are a necessary intermin-gling of materials and forces: crystal and inner tubes, glass and iron.

They are works that generate themselves through constriction (Accumulo) or through openings and bre-akthroughs (Enlightenments). Connections between different times, links between history and contempo-raneity, emerge in the production of a series of sculptures in frosted glass, cast off an exact replica of a fourteenth century celata.

A formation of black helmets with archaic and indecipherable smiles reveal the eternal return, the conti-nuous renewal of ancient dimensions of power between dominator and dominated, subject and subjected. Their dense black colour seems to absorb all - history and time, past and present - while perhaps repre-senting a tragic point of saturation. Could that enigmatic expression, seemingly unfathomable, become the sign of an awareness, of a resistance, or of an imminent breaking of the ranks?

B[æ]d Time is connected to this same reflexive dimension. It is a bed/sculpture which, through the ironic impossibility of action, becomes a metaphoric couch of torture of thought.

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1st Floor, Bianco, Interno3, Morucchio, Liassidi Palace, Venezia, works exposed: Accumulo, B[æ]d Time, Enlightenments, Celata series 8 sculptures in blown, cast, ground, satin glass, forged iron, rubber, velvet 116

Mari Contro Mari - group show - curated by Enza Di Vinci, Archivio Storico, Pisa 10.12 2009_06.01 2010 work: exposed Accumulo #4, 4 ground black, cristal glass elements, rubber, 90 x 35 x 35 cm

INSTALLATION

Percer-Voir #1, 2002, Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia

Percer-Voir #2, 2003, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Hobart

Percer-Voir #3, 2006, Islington Hotel, Hobart

Laudes Regiae, 2007, Convento Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, Venezia

Disco Moon, 2009, Piazza San Lorenzo, Vicenza

Percer-Voir #1 - installation - Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia, 25.05_09.06 2002conceived for the group exhibition Opera Buona, curated by Marinella Paderni

Percer-Voir #2 - installation - Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Hobart, 28.03_08.04 2003conceived for the art festival Ten Days on the Island, curated by Robyn Archer

Percer-Voir #3 - installation - since 2006 on permanent display at Islington Hotel, Hobart

The environmental installation Percer-Voir, composed of 14 glass elements, was conceived in Italy for the Chiostri di San Pietro in Reggio Emilia and in Australia for the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Garden lake, Hobart (2003) and for the Hotel Islington terrace, Hobart (2006). The glass elements were installed either using iron bars attached to their bases and inserted into the ground or on tripods set on the bottom of the lake. The impact of the light renders the spires dynamic. Through the changing effects of reflection and refraction, these open up brand new perceptions/visions of the space.

The installation is made by glass points “springing out of” earth or water. The visual effect is that points likely flow out of the ground or of the water. The natural light permeates the mate glass points giving them dynamism, shape and “essence”. The movement of our visual field respect the installa-tion space reveals rhythmically the presence of the points that virtually project around their diagonal or vertical tangents. The linear projections of the crystal points are propagated in the space connec-ting earth/sky and creating a visionary scenery of one environment crossed by light flows.

The synergy created by placing glass “points” within the environment activates a vibration process by which visitors are deeply engaged, and through the experience stimulated to see in them an inner experience that transcends rationality. The title Percer-Voir, from the French “perceive”, plays on the literal translation of the two terms: pierce and see. The title encourages the physical and objective perception of the environment through a sequence of perforations - metaphorically, by the glass points - that stimulate an emotional and subjective perception, a greater understanding allowing us to see by piercing, lighting the depths of one’s own soul.

The installation elements, point or tip, could be considered as “archetype of the physical world, created by the spiritual forces and floating in the ethereal world”. It would represent the spiritual energy by which the nature has been created and constantly is renewed and strengthened. It shows the existence of a potent and inexplicable reality, not visible to the sensible and superficial observation of the nature.

The project Percer_Voir of course doesn’t want to represent just this idea, it intends to facilitate the interior process that permits the observer to fuse his own personality with the natural environment. The aim of the installation project is to put the observer in an emotional state which allows him to transpose his spirit in the nature; a sort of empathy or unio mistica propeller of interior dynamics determining an acquiring of self-consciousness.

Percer_Voir #1, 2002, Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia14 blown ground and satin glass elements, 110 x 11 x 11 cm each, installation size 90 x 900 x 700 cm 124

Percer_Voir #2, 2003, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Hobart 14 blown ground and satin glass elements, 110 x 11 x 11 cm each, installation size 110 x 2000 x 1000 cm 126

130Percer_Voir #2, 2003, Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, Hobart 14 blown ground and satin glass elements, 110 x 11 x 11 cm each, installation size 110 x 2000 x 1000 cm

Percer_Voir #3, 2006, Islington Hotel, Hobart 14 blown ground and satin glass elements, 110 x 11 x 11 cm each, installation size 110 x 1000 x 800 cm

Laudes Regiae - installation - Convento Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, Venezia 08.06_ 29.07 2007

Laudes Regiae is a work that proposes transversal connections between historic heredity, spiritual journey and socio-political contemporaneity. Developed for the space of the ex Convent of Saints Cosma and Damian, XI century, it consists of 17 frosted blown glass helmets, inspired by a sallet from the XIV century, of images projected using various techniques of the Wolf of Passau, the effigy emblazoned on the swords produced in the Middle Ages and of the audio track of the so-called Laudes Regiae, the Chorus for the Crowning Mass, XI century.

Laudes Regiae is the result of the combination of the bare, minimal context of the Hall of the Fireplace and the installative elements. The ambience is illuminated solely by natural light pouring in through the fourteen windows. The light is filtered and diffused by the veils of white cloth, which render the whole exhibition space homogenous, enveloping and hieratic.

Andrea Morucchio’s stimulus and proposal for reflection, thus use a “high”, clean aesthetic, which is in-tensely evocative, in order to arrive at equally profound rational themes. The title of the installation project, Laudes Regiae, refers to the definition given to a particular genre of liturgical invocation which accompa-nied the crowning of sovereigns of antiquity and early Christian society. Starting from Christ Victor and King, they served to acclaim in Him his emperors, sovereigns, bishops and popes. In practice, through the repeated mantra, the prayer took on the function of affirming in the popular unconscious, the divine derivation of human power. In his book Laudes Regiae, a study of liturgical acclamations and of the Cult of the Sovereign in the Middle Ages, Ernst Kantorowicz defines them as an acclamation, which sound as the direct affirmation of the power and the glory in which the figure of Christ is that of the militant conqueror.

Through an analysis of the socio-political-communicative valency of the Laudes Regiae, expressions of a kind of medieval - political theology -, surprising elements of continuity from certain aspects of the me-dieval world to our contemporaneity, become apparent. G. Agamben asserts that modern power is not only “administration”, but also “glory” and the ceremonial, liturgical and acclamatory aspects which we are accustomed to consider as a residue of the past, actually still constitute the basis for Western power. The function of acclamations and glory, in the modern form of public opinion and consensus is still today at the heart of political devices of contemporary democracies.

The innovation of our times is in the function of the media in determining a new and unheard of concen-tration, multiplication and dissemination of the function of glory as the centre of the political system. That which once was confined to the liturgical and ceremonial spheres is now concentrated in the media and, together, through these, it spreads and penetrates into every moment and every area, public and private, of society. Contemporary democracy is a democracy which is integrally based on glory, that is, on the potency of the acclamation, multiplied and disseminated by the media in the form and according to the strategies of spectacular power.

Laudes Regiae, 2007, Convento Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, Venezia17 elements in blown cast and satin glass, 45 x 35 x 30 cm each, dimmer light projection, sound

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On A. Morucchio and Laudes Regiae, catalogue text by Paolo Toffolutti, Laudes Regiae, Venezia 2007

A smile accompanies the existential breath that Andrea Morucchio has placed on the floor of the Fireplace Hall in the ex-Convent of Saints Cosma and Damian in Venice. That smile escapes from a medieval helmet and transfers itself definitely in the external space with an absorbed yet mocking gaze, similar to the one emitted by some gnome-shaped lawn ornaments which guard modern gardens.

There are seventeen identical chess pieces, paths of infinite bumps, grooves, irregularities contracted within the blurring of a singular repeated gaze. Indicali casts like half busts of medieval army leaders and/or emperors leaking over from Greco-Roman times, to be re-exhumed, under false pretences, as Olympian gods. They are courageous grimaces frozen in glass, formae vitae insufflated within a stampo malico, which still contains the hollow of its generating breath. Yet they also represent a cemetery of uniforms in the shape of peeled half busts, obtained by being turning inside out, half bodies no longer protected by their armour, exposed in their fragile nudity, delivered to this world with a kick.

They appear as cheerful faces which formally conclude their allegory with enigmatic grimaces, an omen of not being able or not knowing how to parry the blow, which since the beginning of time has loomed over their destiny and that of others. Andrea Morucchio looks to modern and contemporary sculpture, which looks to the past, in order to dialogue with faces and architecture, just as he did years earlier, camera over shoulder, during his prolonged stay in Cuba, caught between the people and the life.

The human figure is the territory, which before Morucchio, had been crossed by Medardo Rosso, Gino De Dominicis, Anish Kapoor and Thomas Schutte among many others. The object made red - like the blood casts of Antony McQueen - shifts the consideration from form to material. The glass, the transparency, the intangibility of which these guards are made, likens them to bloodied pawns, aligned in offensive and defensive positions on the same side. Medardo Rosso paved the road which connected figure and architecture in a wide and uninterrupted gesture of light, which now caresses the frosted glass of LaudesRegiae as it previously did the wax. The material is already an image of light, reflected light, which wisely guided, has brought the gesture and the gaze beyond reach.

I do not feel it is necessary to underline the reference to the sacred. It suffices to think of the examples of infinite invulnerability in the outlines of Gilgamesh and Urvasi, shaded in the tableaus which Gino De Dominicis left us and which so singularly relate with this army of hollows. And lastly, Thomas Schutte expresses the entire sociality of the people which exudes from every figure, a people recomposed in a domestic unity, placed in charge of all the moments of life. A worldliness which receives these glass works of convex surfaces and curved borders and which, creates connections through the unitary and simple forms, similar and contrary to the functionality of Alessi design, which makes itself ironic and familiar, while relating with the stereotypes of cartoon culture, through functional shapes which appear organic, phytomorphic or phallic.

Highs and lows continuously ricochet. There can no longer be sensuous or conceptual separations: the object, circumvented by a comic form, surrounds itself with an aura of sacredness like a volatile emotion or thought caught between laughter and tears. Paraphrasing Louis Wauxcelles, the work could thus be expounded, Laudes Regiae: “Seventeen Gnomes in the mid-1400s!”

The mystery of the State: widespread of power, diffusion of resistences, catalogue text by Beppe Caccia, Laudes Regiae, Venezia 2007 Whoever enters the installation created by A.M. is surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery. This is the mystery surrounding the exercise of political power, which seems to reinforce itself ruling over the life of human beings - as Kantorowitz discussed - to the point of almost making it become invincible in every space and at every time. The question we are called to answer is if such mystery does result unfathomable, a Gorgon’s glance capable to annihilate any claim of effective freedom from it and to oblige to the mere alternative between defeat and testimony, or if such mystery could be in any way penetrable and to which extent deconstructable. That is if this would not effectively result into the effect of a permanent unresolved tension, the aura produced by a conflictual, antagonistic relationship that of this mystery is indeed the primary engine, anything but still.

Although sovereignty can only be considered, in the last analysis, as exercise of bare force - or as better Weber put it - an attempt to monopolise the use of the coercion instruments, it is absolutely clear that it works, and has always worked through processes of consent building. As Foucault argued - it works through the continuously renewing of the subjectivation processes in a both meanings, as a production of subjects in both meanings. It is not simply propaganda, in terms of public opinion formation or conscience manipulation, but it is mainly the subject-building in the power relation. This paradigm particularly applies - as Agamben has recently argued - to the inquest about the link between liturgical acclamation and ritual of sovereignty, a invariant character of the political power.

The laudes ritual should not fool us: the power, even when it does show as such, is not a centre that run over its subjects in univocal unidirectional terms. It is always a relation. As a relation it is always a force relationship, that means relation between forces. It is always a problematic and unstable tension between conflicting forces that produce the power as a relation. Before and after the power there is life in its multiple forms. These lives resist the continuous attempt of sovereignty to reduce them to the Unum.

The sneering smile that seems to be projected by the red figures, looking equal each other but also radi-cally different from each other, crowding Morucchio’s work, remembers us that is the diffusion of multitude resistance that precedes and corresponds to the widespread of power, not allowing it however to become a total and totalised dimension. As often happens within the most interesting expressions of contemporary art, the installation Laudes Regiae opens one’s mind to a further direction: that of the paradoxical turn around of the path described in Schmitt’s “political theology” according to which each concept of the most absorbing of State’s modern doctrine are secularised theological concepts in the apparent regression to our present “political theology”.

A.M. seems to indicate, the passage from the secular tragedy of the formation of the categories of modern politics to the farce, nevertheless charged with violence and suffering, represented by the reappearance of the political and religious pretence to condition the freedom of forms of life, reveal itself as symptom of pro-found weakness of that power in respect to the excess which are expressed precisely by these life forms.

Mala Tempora Currunt, catalogue text by Saramicol Viscardi, Laudes Regiae, Venezia 2007

Political and temporal power. Minimal aesthetics and medieval suggestions. The medieval Laudes Regiae. In A.M.’s new project, past and present, spirituality and secularism are woven together in a visually austere, rigorous path of great formal purity.

The message, however, emerges from an urgent need to clearly demonstrate the disturbing link between ancient history and contemporary politics, and in doing so it tears apart the hall hieratically marked by the red helmets. Laudes were chanted to Christ King in efforts to support the earthly power and supremacy of those who were appointed vicars, through the crowning and the spiritual legitimating of a power, which in fact was much more rooted in meager earthly matters.

It is here where the artist draws our attention, to contemporary papal politics, as conservative and fixed on its own dogmatic positions as it is on political interferences. Meanwhile, American power, which is entirely earthly, is the voice of a new -induced?- urgency for spirituality, justice and good feelings which has nonetheless lead to a preventive war - which in many ways recalls the Christian Crusades - instigated by certain demagogy, which may have something in common with the acclamatory art of these Laudes.

Various contemporary artists, with strong political opinions, have also treated these themes in their works. Santiago Sierra’s recent project Los Anarquistas, carried out in Rome on Christmas Eve, with the participation of a group of militant anarchists hired by the artist to listen in silence to the Mass officiated by the Pope, speaks of the secular power still so deeply rooted in Rome. While with La Nona Ora, M. Cattelan immortalized a Pope John Paul II stricken by a meteorite, fortuitous yet simple in its absurdity, far from the garish and imposing publicity apparatus carried out on the occasion of the subsequent actual death of the Pontiff.

However, it is Morucchio’s reference to classical works of art and to historical imagery, especially from the Veneto area, which transforms his works into something beyond a pure criticism of the system. This dialogue with his surrounding context results in the production of works as contemporary as they are intimately connected to the structure itself of art history.

The Main Show re-presents Canova’s Pietà, both Christian iconology and mass media message, as overbearing as it is everlasting, while in Our Ideas will Triumph, a painting conserved in the Mocenigo Museum of Venice is the crux from which the piece develops. Starting from the narration of a historic fact (the naval battle in which Mocenigo sacrificed his life in order to avoid surrendering to the enemy), A.M. reflects on the need for martyrs and the contemporary transposition, in a climate of impossibility for dialogue and cohabitation amongst different cultures, where the Muslim kamikaze of today finds himself in the memory of the Venetian sacrifice of the 1600s. The Wolf of Passau, symbol of the ars bellica, continues running in the Hall of the Fireplace, an ideal link between what we were and what we still are.

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To guard against the present pestilence, catalogue text by M. L. Brunelli, Laudes Regiae, Venezia 2007

A soft, white enveloping light penetrates the endless parataxis of windows. Hieratic, evocative, flickering, a series of opalescent helmets transports us into a Gothic atmosphere. The sensation the observer feels within Andrea Morucchio’s exhibition is one of reunion with a lost sacredness.

A sacredness of medieval flavour, which smacks of archaic values of forgotten fidelity and choral convictions. The overbearing music penetrates the ears deafening them, creating a padded, atemporal space of perpetual suspension. After the audio and visual plunge which confuses our temporal coordinates, stricken, we drift, investigate, explore the new world trying to understand the strange objects that delineate this exotic universe.

And it is precisely when we are convinced that we are in a different dimension, that the cardinal points reveal themselves to be forever the same. Medieval man turns out to be evolutionistically identical to modern man. We are what we are, as we were, forever limited by the same reference points. The glorifying pompous music is but a different screen, not cathodic, yet equally strong, from which power watches over us and guides us. The helmet, rare, unique, precious, a superb product of human genius and creativity, when worn, is not unlike the modern “tanks on wheels” which emphasize the status symbol of their owners through their power/exclusiveness/cost.

From this perspective, it is not a far stretch to see the wolf engraved on the Passau blade as the prodrome of the trademark/logo/signature. Yet we quickly realize that there is much more... We realize that the man who signed his work was conscious of his own ability and his own value. No longer one among the other producers, but a single man, fully conscious of his individuality, thus a first bearer of that humanism which now permits us to see the art of a single man as genius. Abandoning, but not completely, the vertigo of transcendence and of the ineffable, which still watches over us, leniently, from the omnipresent monogram of Saint Bernardino, overcoming us through its representation in the monumental fireplace of this immense hall.

A monogram which now reveals itself in its dramatic topicality, magically in tune with the hidden message of the artist’s installation. This space was in fact sculpted by the faithful of the year one thousand, who erected the building as a defensive bastion against the plague. But a plague, Morucchio whispers in the ear of the faithful of the year two thousand, awaits us always in whatever time we hide disguised as demagogic poison.

DISCO MOON - installation - Piazza San Lorenzo, Vicenza 20.07 2009conceived for Effimero project, Sistemi di Contemporaneo, curated by Alberto Zanchetta

Disco Moon by Claudia Amato & Alberto Zanchetta, Vicenza 2009

The context of the EPIDE®MIE review gave rise to the EFFIMERO project - an event dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. Eighteen artists have been invited to elaborate on Bruno Munari’s Aconà Biconbì modular structure with the purpose of [re]transforming it into a “unique” and “ephemeral” object.

Andrea Morucchio’s Disco Moon stems from this revisitation of the famous micro-sculpture: nineteen circular elements – made of cardboard, wood, and photographic prints – reproduce just as many moons. The artist has set these archetypal and primordial forms into silver discs and scattered them on the ground, granting them a radial movement, like orbitting spheres imitating the motion of heavenly bodies. Through these luminous limbos, it becomes possible to see a reflection of both the sky and the istoriato façade of the adjacent Temple of San Lorenzo - an optic effect which implicates astrology and religion.

As the artist explains, the title of the installation intends to create “iconoraphic short-circuits between Catholic and pagan symbols, by the consequent return to origins of religious sentiment, and also, by the observation of space, the stars, and their influence”. Inevitably, the viewer’s thoughts leap to the great philosophers of the past - to Plato (who saw in the circle the perfect form, later adopted as the medieval symbol of the absolute). Likewise, the magic circles of neo-pagan rituals aimed at creating an imaginary space able to separate, if only ideally, the material world from the supernatural one.

Form without a beginning or an end, a life cycle which repeats infinitely and returns in the famous squaring of the circle - symbol of the dualistic desire to bring the celestial and terrestrial spheres back in concordance… But if in astrology and the ocult sciences man is unconsciously introduced to his own destiny, in Morucchio’s work it is man himself (as a pasing element) who controls the unfolding of events. The viewer’s attention thus shifts from the hypnotic, multi-coloured moons to the surrounding envrionment, which becomes an integral and reverse part of the installation.

The gaze seizes the lunar circles, while the mind registers and inverts them along the perpendicular axis of the rose window in a finite/infinite game, [de]materializing the cyclical nature of the natural process and the repeating of the phenomena which subtend to the laws of the universe. And finally, the stress falls on the absence of ruptures and on the spatial-temporal indissolubility, or rather, on an intrinsic circularity of atavistic symbols and cultural legacies, almost like a temenos that induces the passer-by into awe, inhibiting him or her from crossing it.

Disco Moon, 2009, Piazza San Lorenzo, Vicenza 19 elements in silver cardboard, wood and photo prints, diameter 22 cm each, installation size diameter 300 cm

MAKING OF

Blade, Enlightenments, 2000

Percer-Voir, 2002, 2003

Offshoots, 2006

Celata, 2007

Blade, Enlightenments, 2000 152

Percer-Voir, 2002-2003

Off Shoots, 2006

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Celata, 2007

VIDEO-SOUND INSTALLATIONS

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno, 2002, Museo Mocenigo, Venezia

Eidetic Bush, 2003, Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart

Talk Show, 2006, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Venezia Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, 2008, Campo San Bortolomeo, Venezia

Tracciati Esistenziali, 2008, Campo Santa Margherita, Venezia

Sri Yantra, 2008, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno - video-sound installation - Museo Mocenigo, Venezia, 30.11_06.01.2003 conceived for Gemine Muse, young artists in italian museums, curated by Virginia Baradel

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno / Our Ideas Will Triumph is a video-sound installation incorporating digital enhanced video projections developed from photos of the painting Battaglia Navale by anonimus, Luigi Nono musical score Il Canto Sospeso and postcards placed in all the Museum spaces. Video has been projected on the wall at the upper corners of the painting in the Museum Red Room. A cyan light has been projected on the painting.

Following the directions of the Gemine Muse exhibition project, I identified the work I was to be challanged by in the Mocenigo Museum: the painting is referred to as Naval Battle; it celebrates the heroic act of the ship Captain Zaccaria Mocenigo who, during a naval battle, did not hesitate to blow up his ship and sacrifice his own life as well as that of some of his crew rather than surrender to the enemy. The drama of the ultimate sacrifice, that of the martyr, of sacrificing oneself for an ideal, is what led me to take on this painting through an approach aimed at exasperating its celebratory rhetoric, on the very account of its sadly extreme topicality.

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno consists of the atmosphere that the interaction between the painting, the XVIII Century museum space, the music and the video images succeeds in creating thus emotionally involving the visitor in order to subsequently trigger his reflexion on a phenomenon which is dramatically and tragically very relevant today as well as on the ambiguity of the rhetoric celebrating it.

The video projection: on the wall, at the upper corners of the painting, images of the hovering bodies of the explosion victims are projected. These images, removed from their pictorial context, undergo a major transformation: hugely blown out, colourless, transparent and barely defined, they fluctuate in postures highly charged with formal tension albeit voided of any physicality. As they pulsate, the images gradually become visible to dissolve again amongst the lilies of the brocade on which they are projected thanks to a montage which, modifies their grey tones. That same lily pattern is also the “backdrop” of the video which, by means of the single special effect used, appears to be moving constantly and regularly “wavelike”, like a metronome marking the time constantly and inexorably on the martyrs’ apparitions.

The music: the images appear, disappear, alternate following the rhythm set by the chorus of Luigi Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso. The choice of this music has not had simply to do with the formal suggestive strength of the composition but also with the words sung by the choir and taken from a letter written by a condemned during the Resistance to Nazifascism: ….I am dying for a world that will shine with so much light with such beauty that even my sacrifice is nothing in itself. Millions of men died for this world on barricades and in wars. I am dying for justice. Our ideas will triumph.

This text has been published on postcards placed in all the Museum spaces. It is awesome to realize how such words have forever accompanied the history of mankind and even more so how these expressions can be adapted to the most diverse subjects up to, in particular, today’s dramas.

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno, 2002, Museo Mocenigo, Venezia28 min. vhs video double projection 200 x 250 cm, cyan spot light, sound

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno, 2002, details of the painting La battaglia navale, XVIII centh. Museo Mocenigo, Venezia

Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno, catalogue text by Efthalia Rentetzi, for Gemine Muse, Torino 2002

In his work, Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno, Andrea Morucchio measures himself against the painting in the red room of the museum in Palazzo Mocenigo entitled La Battaglia Navale by anonymous artist. In the latter pinting the narrative element prevails and we see the admiral of the fleet, Zaccaria Mocenigo, choosing to blow up his flagship so that it does not fall into the hands of the enemy.

The composition, in which the expressive element is pretty contained and spatial and atmospheric relations are lacking, reveals though a series of concepts dealing with the theme of human sacrifice during war today lends itself more than ever to a multiplicity of interpretations. Morucchio renounces an autonomous intervention from a dialetic point of view with the 18th-century work and chooses to carry out a dramatization of the work and its message in a contemporary key, aiming to emotionally involve the spectator.

He breaks up the thematic unity of the painting in a sequence of single photos of details of men caught in the explosin, enlarged and projected rhytmically at the sides of the painting in time with Luigi Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso. The figures are isolated, extrapolated from their narrative context and suspended on a strongly symbolic red background. The spheres of both communications and creativity thus suffer profound changes due to technological development. The expressive language tends towards a dramatic rendering and the creation of a highly evocative atmosphre.

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Eidetic Bush - video-sound installation - Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart, 28.03_16.04 2003conceived for Italian Artist in Residence, Claudio Alcorso Foundation, curated by Noel Frankham

The impact of the nation-wide bush fires in Australia over the 2002/03 summer had a great effect on me inspiring the multi-media project Eidetic Bush. This work incorporates digital enhanced video projections developed from performative acts in burnt bush environments and Luigi Nono musical score Caminantes…Ayacucho. Eidetic Bush explores the mystery and dynamism of the human creative impulse.

By peformance and video installation, Eidetic Bush seeks to express a spiritual link between contemporary artistic ideals with the motivating forces behind the creativity of early man. The fire has transformed the colours of the bush into a monochromatic variation of grey shades and has sublimated any living form by creating an aesthetic condition typified by a primordial silence.

In this dramatically suspended atmosphere, the silence of the newly burnt bush is charged with visionary tension; the eidetic ability, that elevates the mind’s eye to co-equality with visual sensation, dissolving the boundaries between imagination and perception, myth and reality is stimulated. The artist’s intervention acquires a “shamanic”, sacredness-bestowing meaning, which can reactivate the contact with vision and “dream up” new myths and new rituals.

E.B. has been developed in two stages: the first one is performative acts carried out in some burnt bush areas where I created spirals on the tree trunks either with strips of clay or by carving marks into the char-red bark. The spirals are created as elementary gestures; a creative and cathartic act of deep empathy with the ‘spaceless’, timeless dimension of the burnt bush. It might be the ritual expression of ancient peoples, all traces of whom have been lost/destroyed.

Shapes of essential plasticity, such as a spiral wrapping itself around a charred tree, express a bond between reduction and regression, between basic forms and the ‘ur-forms’ of the mind. In the second stage of creating E.B., the digital images of the landscape where the ‘installation ritual’ took place were en-hanced, using 3D software, to make virtual spirals. In this way the ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ appear as a mutual interaction of two expressive means – the simple human act and digital manipulation – of similar value, but of different aspect and nature.

The images thus produced are projected on two screens for the visitor to experience as a vision of the landscape in perspective. Spirals appear and disappear on the trees with pulsating semi-transparently as they follow the rhythm of Luigi Nono’s musical score, Caminantes…Ayacucho. Whenever the digital spirals appear in full it is impossible to distinguish them from those physically created in the bush.

E.B. is the outcome of complex creative dynamics which utilize otherwise antithetic expressive means and cause them to interact in order to represent how normal boundaries between the products of the mind and the evidence of the senses can be broken down.

Eidetic Bush, 2003, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart, 42 min. dvd video double retroprojection 300 x 700 cm, sound

Eidetic Bush, 2003, performative acts in burnt bush environments, Glenorchy, Mount Dromedary, Hobart

Eidetic Bush, 2003, stills from video

Eidetic Bush, catalogue text by A. MorucchioTasmanian School of Art & Claudio Alcorso Foundation, Hobart, 2003

The important task of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one that has destructive-constructive quality.1 Today, the avant-garde is so completely controlled and domesticated wi-thin the Empire’s framework that a whole new series of different regulating and resistance models must be found to counterbalance the Empire’s globalization attempts.2

The avant-garde, which used to be the cultural ‘cutting edge’, an oppositional or transgressive countercul-ture that possessed the deftness to rearrange the terms of our culture or inspire fundamental reform, has been defeated and rendered impotent by its absorption into the mainstream.3 The ’70s represented not the last flowering of a new consciousness, but rather the last incandescent expression of the old idealism of autonomy. After this no cultural expression would be outside the commodity system…a crystalline world responsive only to numerical imperatives, formal manipulation and financial control.4

Values imposed by the contemporary ‘Empire’, based on mere economic logic, are replacing human va-lues, …intrinsic values have been replaced by simulated, synthetic values. Just as the church provided the universal spirit for the feudal age, the abstract value systems of business management provide the universal spirit in the current age.5 False values spun by the system-dependent media are justifying pre-emptive wars, ecological disasters and intolerable repressions of opposition movements.

The level of torpor, of cultural conformity into which the individual consciousness has sunk within the world’s democracies is due to the annihilation of the ability to assess events autonomously. We use the communication medium, the culture medium to preserve mass drabness and indifference, to hold the masses in a subaltern function.6 We are controlled by those who control the media. TV topicality insidiously tends to increasingly become a normative, prescriptive order, by manipulating and treating situations which are subsequently dished up as real.7 ‘Videocracies’ have actually replaced formal democracies, thus ma-king public opinion more easily controllable. Passivity in front of TV spectacle is the very opposite of waking up, looking at events critically, seeing reality and feeling responsible – that is to say, responding to what is going on.8 Capital is the now-dominant form of ‘socius’, the register for organising bodies as conduits of desire. The organised desiring-body in capitalism is the subjugated group of the human.

Prior to capital, the major forms of socius were territories of tribes or clans. Socius and organised bodies are always held together by some dominant spectacle. With the morphing of socius from territory into capital, spectacle has morphed from ritual body-marking, into the ubiquitous surveillance known as panopticon.9 At this point, it’s rapidly becoming obvious that the achievments of modern technocratic society have been a mixed blessing, and that our profit-maximazing, competitive attitudes will have have to be transformed, because the present values of growth, power and domination are not sustainable.10

If we consider the freedom of artistic creation not just as a road of escape but as a necessary means for discovering and perhaps even changing the features of the world we live in, how can contemporary artistic production respond to the demands for cultural renewal and change? So what are the models for regula-tion and resistance? How can we exorcize, …the nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game which holds the awakening soul still in its grip.11

We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of these times.12 I believe Suzie Gablik may have some answers: The holistic paradigm is bringing inner and outer subjective and objective worlds closer together. When this perception of a unified field is applied to human society and to culture, it makes us the codetermining factor in the reality-producing process; we are not just witnesses or spectators.13 By virtue of an interactive system, we should restore the power of the imagina-tion, revive myth, the archetypes, the symbols, and reawaken our vision and dreaming.

When we retrieve this vision, by making it explicit, by bringing it to light, the consensually legitimatised vi-sion of the social ego is radically called into question.14 A savage change that would lead to a reassessment of the relationships between the individual and society and emphasise the severance of the human-nature bond. Through Art, this change in the sphere of spirituality and ethics can become part of the collective project to remove the false values, the destruction and the stereotypes that play such big role in today’s life from our planet.

The artist must try to discover the religious essence, the major sense of things… that of the primitive peo-ple.15 To cease to be hypnotized by the rational bias of Western society, through developing a more open model of the psyche, so that as culture we can recover the ability to ‘dream forward’ and reclaim the power and importance of vision. The visionary function, which fulfils the soul’s need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things, has been suppressed, with the result that, as culture, we have lost the gift of vision. We have lost access to the magical world of archetypal myth and symbol, the world of Dreamtime.16

The investigation of the subconscious roots of human representation, the fascination with the ideal of the universal sign, and the matter of linkage between the deep irrational past of man and his present science-dominated culture are hardly passing infatuations or unworthy concerns for art … these broader recurrent aspects of modernist primitivism persisted as challenges endemic to modern culture.17 In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts - the power of homeopathic magic or the Primitive’s be-liefs in the power of mental forces to affect the world - been retained, and that is in the field of art. There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art’s sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses, which are for the most part extinct today.18 The Eidetic Bush installation project expresses a spiritual identification of contemporary artistic ideals with the motivating forces behind the creativity of primal man.

It is a work inspired by the very same deep, ancestral and now almost extinguished sensitivity that would make it possible to creatively connect with nature, or, even more so, with what is one of nature’s most dra-matic and suggestive expressions, namely the Australian burnt bush landscape. The Eidetic Bush project is based on the deep and direct connection of my spiritual energy with that of the burnt bush, whereby the creative act becomes a…production of new authentic values by delving into the memories of the immemo-rial past and expressing them in pure forms.20

The artist’s intervention acquires a “shamanic”, sacredness-bestowing meaning, which can reactivate the contact with vision and “dream up” new myths and new rituals. Eidetic Bush is, therefore, a work which, whilst rediscovering ‘the savage within’, the irrational, the ideals that suggest an escape from the Western tradition towards a primitive state, aims at emphasising the importance for contemporary man to acquire a new kind of awareness which would enable him to become enraged about and react against the most blatant signs of injustice toward and despair of entire peoples.

Eidetic Bush restores the dimension within which the sacred and nature are as one with life, where each act becomes a ritual, where sacredness is the fusion between man’s nature-bound imagination and his instinct, where the original, primal bond that makes man part of the Earth is sacred. Eidetic Bush underlines contemporary man’s need to rediscover this ancestral dimension by a ‘primitivizing’ work the function of which is, …necessarily antagonistic, running disruptively against the grain of conformist, repressive Western society in order to revivify the anarchic energy of primal man.20 I am talking about an acute and urgent need to be collectively shocked by the geopolitical tragedies caused by the Empire’s increasingly intolerable economic logic.

As we meditate on the human soul, we detect, … two principles preexisting reason, of which one strongly concerns our wellbeing and preservation whilst the other instills into us a kind of natural revulsion for watching the death or the suffering of any sensitive being, especially our own kind. When we look at human society, it appears to be only showing the violence of the mighty and the oppression of the poor. Our spirit rebels against the harshness of the former and we tend to deplore the blinding of the latter.21

It is generally assumed that the seeing of apparitions is far commoner among primitives than among civilized people, In my view… psychic phenomena occur no less frequently with civilized people than they do with primitives. I’m convinced that if a European had to go through the same exercises and ceremonies, which the medicine-man performs in order to make spirits visible, he would have the same experiences.22

The burnt bush is the very place that at the one time stimulates our vision as well as the creative act representing it. The fire has transformed the colors of the bush into a monochromatic variation of grey shades and has sublimated any living form by creating an aesthetic condition typified by a primordial silence in which, … all actions are stilled and we need to rely on a state of being which encompasses and harmonizes the affirmative and the negative, any opposites, any antonyms.23

Only silence lets us discover the error at the basis of our existence, only in the silence that hushes up the din of our existence are the premises for our thinking to be found.24 In the silence of the bush we feel and this is possible because we are close to the spectral, to the yet-to-be-awakened consciousness or inner becoming. In this dramatically suspended atmosphere, the silence of the newly burnt bush is charged with visionary tension; the, … eidetic ability that elevates the mind’s eye to co-equality with visual sensation, dissolving the boundaries between imagination and perception, myth and reality is stimulated. It produces representations that are held to be medians between subjectivity and objectivity, between the rational unconscious and the individual experience.25

Eidetic Bush is the outcome of complex creative dynamics which utilize otherwise antithetic expressive means and cause them to interact in order to represent how normal boundaries between the products of the mind and the evidence of the senses can be broken down. Eidetic Bush has been developed in two stages: the first one is an act carried out in some burnt bush areas where I created spirals on the tree trunks either with strips of clay or by carving marks into the charred bark. All the images of the spiral, of the emergence of light from shadow express the ideas of movement, of cycle, of duration, of passage from one mode of being into another passage of the “unformed”, the shadow, into the “formed”, to the light.26 The burnt bush, the inspiration for visionary power, at the same time is also, … a plastic space within which to arrange objects and bodies conceived as performance or visual presentation.27

The spirals are created as elementary gestures; a creative and cathartic act of deep empathy with the ‘spaceless’, timeless dimension of the burnt bush. It might be the ritual expression of ancient peoples, all traces of whom have been lost/destroyed, aimed at creating a sacred space of communion– an installation that represents an effort to join opposites and articulate polarities. The sacred space is the place where communication is possible between this world and the other world, from the heights or from the depths, the world of the gods or the world of the dead.28 I see the primitive artist as a model of purified spirituality, the creator of abstractions that embodied the basic underlying order of nature.

The tribal artist’s shape and content was, … dictated by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding.29

Modelling strips of clay over the trees or carving their bark represents the expressive gesture of a pre-reflexive being creating elemental forms of a quasi-anonymous archetypal universality. … an instinctive expression of the individual without a system of representation, a primal creativity as evidence of form-giving energies that replaces anything that could traditionally be called technique.30

Shapes of essential plasticity, such as a spiral wrapping itself around a charred tree, express a bond between reduction and regression, between basic forms and the ‘ur-forms’ of the mind. Art has demonstrated that universal beauty does not arise from a particular character of the form, but from the dynamic rhythm of its inherent relationships. Art has revealed that the forms exist only for the creation of relationships, that forms create relationships and that relationships create forms.31

In the second stage of creating Eidetic Bush, the digital images of the landscape where the ‘installation ritual’ took place were enhanced, using 3D software, to make virtual spirals. In this way the ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ appear as a mutual interaction of two expressive means – the simple human act and digital manipulation – of similar value, but of different aspect and nature.The images thus produced are projected for the visitor to experience as a vision of the landscape in perspective. Actual and virtual spirals appear and disappear on the trees with pulsating semi-transparently as they follow the rhythm of Luigi Nono’s musical score, Caminantes…Ayacucho.

The aesthetics consists of the ‘resonance’ flashing and lighting up which creates sense-driven relationships between the objects and the events taking place, starting from a secret order inside reality. The aesthetics is the light thrown on one aspect of coexisting elements, where one element generates the next against a backdrop of shared signs, along a pathway made up of inner, secret ‘rememorization’ links so that thinking is also remembering.32 Whenever the digital spirals appear in full it is impossible to distinguish them from those physically created in the bush. The inability to distinguish between an actual gesture and a virtual replication is essential to a project that aims to reawaken the sensitivity that allows one to see the invisible, to embody the disembodied, to materialize the spiritual and spiritualize matter. In a synergy with the environment, the spiral shapes, be they the outcome of a primitive gesture or a digital creation, … manifest their inner core to man’s senses by an outer imprint, a signatura rerum.33 From the period of pre-dialectic thought, the essential function of the symbol is precisely in disclosing the structures of the real inaccessible to empirical experience.34 The choice of the spiral shape that moves snake-like up the charred tree was completely instinctual and visionary; I have subsequently discovered that, … the mythological world, like Aboriginal society, was segregated into two great moieties, on one side was fire, and on the other the serpent.

Though antagonistic, incompatible, they remain symbolically and emotionally linked in a dialectic of life and death…That dialectic endowed the mythology of Aboriginal fire with a special power. It divided the universe into the burned and the unburned, and it granted to humans alone the power to shape that universe guided by their ancestral totems and songlines.35 One fundamental experience is to unlearn, to no longer know what one knows, to let oblivion operate so that it can perform the unpredictable reshuffling of the sediments of the cultures and creeds we have passed through.36

The choice of the musical piece Caminantes… Ayacucho by Luigi Nono as the sound component of the video installation is connected to both the visionary tension of the composition and its references to Ayacu-cho, a symbol of the struggle against colonialist oppression, and Giordano Bruno’s ‘visionary esotericism’, of whom the choir sings an extract taken from De La Causa Principio e Uno. The composition is characte-rized by the dialectic created between the silences or the pianissimi and the rapid rising of contrasts, the sudden burst of a fortissimo. For Nono, silence is the origin-source of thought, hence of sound.37

The infinite longing to go beyond what is not there, beyond reality’s narrow dimension, this very longing creates a yearning for a higher level, for flying, for nature. But do not forget, however, how in a spiral the symbol for elsewhere is the central axis, the home. This means that coming and going are complementary. Like sound that tends to move towards the World’s Openness and silence that brings it back to Earth.38 Nono’s gesture is ritualistic. It is a breath of air that stirs sound out of its quiet, this possible sound reverts to silence at once: there it ceases to be.39 A music where the astonishment discovered not only at the origin of thought, but of emotion as well dominates. The world of the imagination is therefore a pre-logical realm.40 Humankind’s progress continuously distances it from its primitive state, the more we gather new knowled-ge, the more we remove the means to acquire the more relevant one.41

My use of a ‘primitive language’ to assist artistic expression within Eidetic Bush, respects and reflects an-cient man’s capacity to connect with nature, … at the time of the Europeans’ arrival in 1642, the Tasmanian Aborigines, thanks to an exceptional isolation lasting 10,000 years, possessed the most elemental material culture in the world...42, and therefore one most closely connected to and dependent on the Earth and its cycles. Before falling victim to one of the most brutal and successful genocides in the history of world colo-nization, the Tasmanian Aborigines, at most 4000 hunter-gatherers, represented the expression of the most profound and purest connection that man could establish with nature, the original, primal bond whereby man becomes part of the Earth and his every gesture acquires an evocative, ritualistic dimension.

In accepting the invitation to undertake the Claudio Alcorso Foundation residency, I assumed that my inve-stigation of man’s capacity for spiritual connection with the land would occur within the pristine Tasmanian wilderness. However the coincidence of my visit with the catastrophic wave of bushfires during the deve-lopment of the Eidetic Bush project - summer 2003 - prompted some major reconsideration of how best to represent a site for such reflection. The worst drought in Australia since reliable records began in 1910 the nation-wide catastrophe is the direct result of the human-induced global warming. The actual trend in Australian temperatures is now matching climate models of how temperatures respond to increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. These greenhouse gas increases occurring today are due to human activity.43 Not only that, but the destruction caused by bushfires metaphorically recalls the destructiveness of a clear-felling old growth forests. Although Tasmania is one of the last remaining wilderness havens, more than 20,000ha of Tasmania’s native forests are clear-felled each year.44

endnotes text

1 Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art and other Essays, Schultz, New York 1945 2 Okwi Enwezor, Documenta 11, Platform 5, Exhibition Catalogue, Cantz Ed., Ostfildern-Ruit 20023 Ronald Jones, as quoted by Suzi Gablik in, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, New York, 19914 Peter Halley, Notes on Abstraction, from Arts Magazine, New York, Vol. 61, June/Summer 19875 P. Graham, 14 Theses on Future Research into the Impacts of New Media, Real Time, Open City, Sydney, no.52, 20036 Luigi Nono, Musica e Massa popolare, forum, Music School Cimarosa, Avellino, recorded 19787 Renè Burger, Verso un Paradigma mobile?, Km/n, EFFE srl Perugia, Gennaio 20018 Suzie Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, New York, 19919 Deluze G. and Guattari F. as quoted by K. Kang, Microcosmos and Micropolitics, Real Time, Sydney, n. 52, 2003reference: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Mineapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 198310 Suzie Gablik, op.cit11 Wassily Kandisky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, Constable, London 191412 Jean Arp, Arp on Arp, Viking, New York 197013 Suzi Gablik, op cit.14 David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, New York-London 198815 Joan Mirò, as quoted by G. Duthuit, Enquête, Cahiers d’art 14, n.1-4, 193916 Suzi Gablik, op.cit. 17 Kirk Varnedoe, Abstract Expressionism, Primitivism in 20th Century Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 198418 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, W.W. Norton, New York 1950, 19 John Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, Delphic Studios, New York 1937 20 Kirk Varnedoe, op. cit. 21 J.J. Rosseau, Origine della Diseguaglianza, Feltrinelli, Milano, 194922 Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche23 Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Una Nuova Formazione Estetica, p.7, Km/n, n1 Gennaio, 200124 Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Sguardo e Destino, Sagittari La Terza, Bari, 198825 Kirk Varnedoe, op cit.26 Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts, Crossroad, New York, 198627 Dario Evola, Fare il Vuoto per Abitare l’Arte. Percorsi dall’Arte alla Scena del Novecento, Km/n, no.1, Gennaio, 200128 Mircea Eliade, op. cit. 29 Barnet Newman, The First Man was an Artist, Tiger Eyes no.1, 194730 Kirk Varnedoe, op. cit. 31 Piet Mondrian, op. cit.32 Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Una Nuova Formazione Estetica, Km/n, no.1 Gennaio, 200133 Jacob Böhme, De Signatura Rerum, Stoccarda,162034 Mircea Eliade, op.cit.35 Stephen J. Pyne, Burning Bush, H. Holt and Company, New York, 199136 Luigi Nono, Lecture at the Giorgio Cini Fundation, 198537 G. Cresta, Intuizione e Metodo nell’Opera di Luigi Nono, from L’Ascolto del Pensiero, Rugginenti, Milano, 200238 Renzo Cresti, Il Suono Nascente per una Nuova Lettura Estetica, from L’Ascolto del Pensiero, op. cit.39 Renzo Cresti, op. cit. 40 Renzo Cresti, op. cit. 41 J.J. Rosseau, op. cit.42 J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton and Company, N.Y.-London, 199743 Global Warming Contributes to Australia’s Worst Drought report44 Annual Report of Forest Practices Board, 1999-2000

Talk Show - video projection - Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzo Tito, Venezia 25.10_19.11 2006conceived for the group show Dis-orders, curated by Marco Baravalle

The video Talk Show consists of the editing together of footage of a discussion amongst a group of acti-vists and artists which took place within the Municipal Greenhouse of the Giardini of Castello, which had just several hours before been occupied and assigned as the operating and exhibiting base of the “artistic resistance workshop” Mars Pavilion. The Mars Pavilion was conceived of as an occupation of an abando-ned nineteenth century greenhouse - next to the Giardini of the Biennale, coinciding with the opening of the 2005 edition of the International Biennale of Art.

The argument, which generated the Talk Show video, was born from the activists’ opposition to the work The Sweetest Dream, by the artist Nemanja Cvijanovic; the work which hung within the greenhouse was a blue European Union flag on which the yellow stars were laid out to form a swastika. Thus, Talk Show is footage of the argument in which artists and activists confronted each other on the political weight of an exhibited work. The negative reaction on the part of the activists was due to an understanding of the work of art tied to its appearance.

Analogous to linguistic communication, in artistic communication, a subject who does not comprehend artistic language, will see the work of art exempt from external references, identifying only its formal and perceivable properties. Talk Show is the video spectacularization of a “clandestine”, genuine, passionate argument, “real - not reality”, a repartee which occurred in a rather gothic, dusky atmosphere, colour-desaturated, due to the infrared takes which give the video a dominant “Martian green”.

Beyond the content, Talk Show exemplifies the founding principle of the Mars Pavilion, or rather of its nature as the constitutive moment of a public space, where with this definition we intend the space of alterity, the place of encounter and confrontation with the other. Moreover, Talk Show, by manifesting the opposition of the two modes that of the political activist and that of the artist of “reading” and therefore of understanding the symbolic representation of a work of contemporary art, evidently underlines the two elements which are at the base of the Dis-orders project, that is, political activism and art.

Talk Show documents an apparently insurmountable moment of crisis in the coexistence and collaboration between the artists and activists of the Mars Pavilion. A crisis which the viewers of the Talk Show installa-tion will see greatly overcome thanks to the placing of a small monitor in an angle of the dark room, playing a video document of the innumerable activities which were then put into action by the Mars Pavilion, thus showing that a synthesis between activism and art is possible and that when this occurs, the artistic, social and communicative results are remarkable.

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Talk Show, 2006, Palazzetto Tito, Venezia, 8 min. 17 sec. dvd video projection 200 x 170 cm, sound

Talk Show, 2006, stills from video

Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla - video-sound installation, urban intervents - Venezia 25_27.01.2008 conceived for the municipal observance of Remembrance Day / Giorno della Memoria

The public art project Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla / Toward the Land of Smoke and Screams is made up of three elements: a public video-sound installation in Campo San Bartolomeo, Venice, the posting of 200 posters throughout the municipal area and the distribution of 5000 postcards with a text by Gadi Luzzato Voghera.

The video is composed of a double slide show made by the alternation of a dozen or so photographic images of symbols sewn onto the clothing of nazi concentration camps interns. The sound, emitted by downward-facing speakers, consists of musical scores from Die Ermittlung / Preliminary Investigation, composed by Luigi Nono as the stage music for Peter Weiss’ theatre piece of the same name. Posters consist in a patchwork of combined images of the symbols used in the projections, the same symbols are combined in pairs on the front of postcards upon which a text by Gadi Luzzato appears on the back.

Pieces of cloth, sewn or embroidered, form six-pointed stars for Jews or simple isosceles triangles, whose different colours indicated homosexuals, communists, the gypsies or prostitutes. Through Internet research, I found dozens of high-resolution colour photographs of scraps of cloth and armbands bearing these symbols. In the documentary photographs and black and white film of the Shoah and the persecution of certain minorities, the Star of David and the triangle are barely recognizable on the clothing of the ghettos and on the loose shirts of the concentration camp inmates. Seeing them in their original colours, in high-resolution photographs, revealing the details of the weave of the threadbare but resistant cloth, the intense colours, embroidered or sewn carefully by hand, they at first appear somehow fascinating.

This sensation is immediately followed by a deep sense of bewilderment when, observing these artifacts carefully in detail, we realize, almost physically like a blow to the stomach, the appalling atrocity which produced them, thus originates from the feeling provoked by the close-up, defined, “tactile” vision of these “relics”, now sold on eBay, with the aim of instigating reflection on the fascination and attraction that racist, discriminatory and xenophobic ideas have always exercised on an ever-growing number of people.

The symbols, used as readymades in a minimal yet powerful allegory of the effects of absolute evil, rife in Europe just a few decades ago, are simply reproposed-reassembled. It is a contemporary artwork, and specifically a public art project, conceived of as a communicative “street-style” marketing operation. It’s a project aimed at visually attracting the target, only to surprise him or her, when after just a few moments, he or she realizes the implication of the symbols.

If the operation is effective, it generates reflection, if even just for a moment, on these stars and triangles which, as Luzzato wrote, [...] are not black and white, thus not a part of past history, but are a coloured patchwork of contemporary memory.

Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, 2008, Campo San Bartolomeo, Venezia, 3 min. dvd video projection, 1500 x 600 cm, sound

Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, 2008, distribution of 5000 postcards, 17 x 12 cm each

Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, 2008, posting of posters throughout Venice municipal area, 95 x 66 cm each

Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, 2008, postcards with a text by G. Luzzato Voghera, 17 x 12 cm each

Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla, by Gadi Luzzatto Voghera

Where are we going? Where are they taking us?To the land of Pitchipoi.When we leave, it’s still dark, when we arrive, it’s already darkIt’s the land of smoke and screamsWhy did our mothers leave us?Who will give us water for death. (Elsa Morante, History, Turin 1974, p. 145)

... not even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be vic-torious. (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, Thesis n. 6)

Stars and triangles, symbols and colours, sewn onto ragged striped pyjamas. Women, men and children transformed into anonymous objects, stücken, pieces to be placed on the shelves of the dead at Au-schwitz Birkenau, Mauthasen and Treblinka.

These triangles and stars do not appear in black and white, thus not as part of past history, but as a co-loured patchwork of contemporary memory. Today, from the offices of power, we are told that in order to protect our mothers and our swollen bellies we must “apply to immigrants the same methods used by the SS: punish ten for every wrong done to one of our citizens”, and that “there was something good even in the most drastic measures taken under Nazi Fascism”.

Thus, perhaps, in the end it is we who are the “Land of Smoke and Screams”.

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Tracciati Esistenziali - video installation - Campo Santa Margherita, Venezia 29.05 2008conceived for the public art project C_art. Artisti in campo Santa Margherita

“Irresistible” nonsense pathways, by Laura Poletto, Venezia 2008

The public art intervention Tracciati Esistentiali / Existential Traces consists of a double video projection on the walls of two buildings overlooking Campo Santa Margherita. Tracciati Esistenziali is based on the blurred shots of a continuous cyclical movement - the constant rotation of small dark shadows moving over a light background and crowding around an empty space. At intervalling, brief fractions of time, the images become clear and extremely quick – almost subliminal - referring to what lies behind these systems. They are ants relentlessly moving amongst themselves, forming a circle.

Blurring becomes the device through which to visually translate the indistinct moving about, the directio-nal homogeneity of shared dynamics within which personal paths and distinct individualities interweave. A single centre of attraction becomes the fire toward which all of the paths of a multitude in transit tend. Introduced into a continuous flow, which is both enthralling and viscous, one risks remaining entrapped. From this perspective, the circle appears to become the symbol of a mechanism of coercion, a chain, a device of submission to the imposition of defined existential modes, rhythms and models of consumption and development. All the while, the rotation continues around nothing, which constitutes both the core and the propulsive drive. This seems to indicate the impossibility of a time of stasis or the suspension of assertion.

The frenetic one-way movement of the small living beings of a not so distant microcosm, whose sense apparently seems to elude the observer, becomes the mirror of macrospic dynamics, of already tra-ced guiding principles, within which the individual risks suffocation, getting lost or dispersion. Beyond one’s own real needs, in the impersonality and a-criticality of a process of pressing homogenization and uniformization, it seems always more difficult to establish a time and a space of distance - a dimension preserved for the assertion of alternative existential possibilities of diversity and dissent. Releasing oneself implies breaking the flow, inverting and multiplying the directions and focal points. Unlike, the ants whose entire life cycle is based on the dependence on a system, on a specific type of society defined by non-disruptable “hard-and-fast hereditary instincts”, man can influence his life through his own behaviour. Reflection and aware analysis can play an important role in this process. (A. Einstein, Why Socialism?, 1949).

Tracciati Esistenziali, 2008, Campo Santa Margherita, Venezia, 5 min. 37 sec. dvd video double projection 600 x 600 cm each

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Sri Yantra - video-sound installation - Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia 29.08_06.09 2008conceived for the group show Notturni Dannunziani. L’uomo tra eros e natura, curated by M. Riccioni

The video sound installation Sri Yantra at the Vittoriale degli Italiani Gardens conceived for Notturni Dannunziani is made of a video retroprojected in loop on one semitransparent screen and the diffusion of a musical score.

The video consists in a single take of my torso, toned in red, upon which the Sri Yantra symbol is tattooed; the movement of the abdominal area, defined by deep inspirations and expirations, follows the rhythm of the soundtrack TibetanGranularSintesisRitual by Alessandro Ragazzo specifically produced for this piece. The video functions as a reflection on the disarticulation of the polyphony of Tibetan mantras.

Sri Yantra is a symbol of knowledge which seemingly projects an inflexible order into the world of forms - that supreme order from which creation issues forth – the eternal coupling of male and female, light and dark, good and evil, love and hate…spirit and matter.

Only through use - and here d’Annunzio proved to truly be a master - of all our senses can we perceive that which surrounds us in the totality of its emotional aspects. For Italians, the Vittoriale is a sacred space that permits the visitor to take a leap into Nature, teacher of life. Notturni Dannunziani lead the visitor to discover every single corner, walking carefully in order not to overlook any element which could nurture our sensitivity – sensuality - Sri Yantra stops the spectator at the beginning of his journey, inviting him or her, through breath, to preserve every sensed image. - M. Riccioni.

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Sri Yantra, 2008, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia, 16 min. dvd video retroprojection 400 x 400 cm, sound

Sri Yantra, 2008, stills from video

Pulse Red - video installation - Fontego dei Tedeschi, Venezia 23.09_25.09 2009 conceived for Outdoors, curated by Associazione Culturale Attivarte

Purposes by Gaia Conti & Domitilla Musella, Venezia 2009

Pulse Red is an artistic intervention focused on the synergy between art scene and public, aimed at esta-blishing a direct communication, beyond any form of mediation, between the artist and spectator.

Within the context of the Outdoors project, Pulse Red is not simply an installation, rather it is a public art intervention. It is a meta-piece in which every aspect of representation functions, in reality, as a key leading back to a precise creative moment. A site-specific work created according to a reciprocal historic and vi-sual linguistic pertinence. The first aim of the entire project - and of this work in particular - is to present art on the public territory, beyond the spaces traditionally delegated to it, encouraging new artistic practices of “contemporaneity” and a re-qualification of the territory and of the collectivity which inhabits it.

Recast, the work recounts the project proposed by the same artist in September 2004. At that time, an illuminated red interference, aimed at the golden globe on the Punta della Dogana da Mar, interpreted the idea of border. Thus, a public intervention with a strong theatrical impact and an undermining tone con-fronted the vast question of mass media communication. Now, in the cloister of the historic Fontego dei Tedeschi, an installation reproducing the video documentation of the precedent intervention physically fits itself into the central space, completely encompassing the walls of the well - a four-sided structure - almost as if to charge itself of the significance on many fronts.

Like Punta della Dogana, the Fontego dei Tedeschi was and is a place of exchange. This overwhelming building, erected by Venetians in 1228, is the point from which the commercial operations of Rialto were controlled. Not only is it the largest historic warehouse of Venice, but it is also the current headquarters of the post office. Here the city’s entire flow of information is sorted. This intervention creates a dialogue between the first performance and the place where it now repeats itself, developing a trajectory of meaning and continuity in the relationship it establishes with the sites.

The spectator is not obliged to adopt a predefined role which could condition his or her vision, as often occurs in museums and galleries. He or she is free to observe the work, through his or her own curiosity, in a space generally not employed for aesthetic purposes. The artist is the first spectator of spaces which tell, intervening through minimal actions and shifts of meaning that gradually accompany the public toward a centre of pulsing interest. In this specific work, maximum tension is reached the moment in which the ball of fire is revealed - the illuminated interference cloaking the golden globe of the architectural structure - the focal point of the performance itself.

The processes of image creation, as developing experience to be manipulated, reread or completed, here occur thanks to the video documentation. In this type of language, the aim translates as a narrative, which from an introductive prologue develops its plot along different paths until finally reaching an epilogue. The work loosens itself from the original context and charges itself with new significance.

Pulse Red, Fontego dei Tedeschi, Venezia, 2009, 06 min. dvd video, 4 lcd monitors 42”, wood structure 220 x 180 x 180 cm

LIGHT PROJECTIONS

Pulse Red, 2004, Punta della Dogana, Venezia

Pulse Red - light projections - Punta della Dogana, Venezia 07.09_13.09 2004 conceived for Borders, multimedia research in to frontiers today, curated by A. Fonda & F. Colasante

The public art project Pulse Red has been realized projecting by four dimmer synchronized spot lights an intermittent red light on the Dogana da Mar Golden Globe. This striking and symbolic light installation at the Venice Customs House, Pulse Red, examines mass communication issues through this particular set-ting, an area of limited access in the heart of Venice. Of the entire structure, designed by Benoni in 1677, Andrea Morucchio chooses to isolate the golden globe that shines in front of the San Marco Bell Tower investing it with a new meaning.

Pulse Red catalogue text by F. Colasante & A. Morucchio, Borders, Patagonia Art, Venezia 2004

The sphere overhanging the tower becomes the support for an intermittent red signal beam. Punta della Dogana / the Customs Point has always been a place of great symbolic power, where one can embrace the whole city in one glance, where human activity meets that of nature. Now, as in the past, boats laden with people and goods come and go; a crossroads of peoples, cultures and different goals. It is exactly this characteristic that not only stimulated the formal and conceptual part of the work, but also provides the key to understanding its message.

The Golden Globe as a point of attraction for those coming by sea to Venice and the Customs House as point of contact with the rest of the world, historic place of exchange, storage and classification. The ex-treme point where information was prepared and then later broadcast to the city and the rest of the known world.

The communication system between different cultures of those days was powered by Venice’s extraordi-nary role as catalyst within the commercial canal network of that time. Inspired by these considerations, Morucchio elaborates a work that examines the hegemonistic tendency of today’s mass media; the pulsing globe becomes an antenna-screen which intercepts the electromagnetic signals of today’s communication flows and absorbs their intelligibility, reducing them to a simple flashing beam.

Allegory, red alert, a system on the edge of collapse, the imposition of propaganda, pervasive, the rhythm of relentless bombardment of information, repeatedly question the individual’s capacity to understand and filter messages. A work such as this exploits the visibility of the place to insert the antagonistic message into the main stream, appropriating its codes of behaviour. In this case the spectacularisation of the artistic gesture works in the opposite way to affirm the necessity for an examination of conscience, usually blurred on such a large scale. A tiny intervention of public art that resounds through three elements: architecture, history and the spirit of a place.

Pulse Red, 2004, Punta della Dogana, Venezia, intermitent red light projections

PHOTOGRAPHY WORKS

Venezia series, 1991-1994 slides 24x36 mm

Gipsoteca series, 1994 negatives b/w 6x7 cm

Grecia series, 1994 slides 24x36 mm

Cuba series, 1995, slides 24x36 mm

Nepal series, 1997 negatives b/w 24x36 mm

Nepal series, 1999, slides 24x36 mm

Sicilia series, 2008, digital RAW files

Venezia series, 2008, digital RAW files

La Habana series, 2009, digital RAW files

Venezia #04, 1991 Venezia #05, 1991 238

Venezia #06, 1991 Venezia #07, 1991 240

Venezia #08, 1992 Venezia #09, 1992 242

Venezia #16, 1993 Venezia #15, 1993 244

Gipsoteca #04, 1994 Gipsoteca #02, 1994 246

Gipsoteca #08, 1994 Gipsoteca #16, 1994 248

Gipsoteca #11, 1994 Gipsoteca #09, 1994

Gipsoteca #07, 1994

Grecia #02, 1994 Grecia #03, 1994

Grecia #04, 1994 Grecia #07, 1994

Grecia #14, 1994 Grecia #09, 1994 262

Grecia #13, 1994 Grecia #11, 1994 264

Cuba #06, 1995 Cuba #09, 1995

Cuba #10, 1995 Cuba #08, 1995

Cuba #16, 1995 Cuba #17, 1995 270

Cuba #18, 1995 Cuba #19, 1995 272

Cuba #20, 1995 Cuba #21, 1995 274

Cuba #24, 1995 Cuba #25, 1995 276

Cuba #26, 1995 Cuba #27, 1995 278

Cuba #28, 1995 Cuba #34, 1995 280

Cuba #30, 1995 Cuba #35, 1995 282

Cuba #36, 1995 Cuba #37, 1995 284

Cuba #46, 1995 Cuba #38, 1995 286

Nepal #02, 1997 Nepal #16, 1997 288

Nepal #18, 1997 Nepal #15, 1997 290

Nepal #08, 1997 Nepal #09, 1997 292

Nepal #24, 1997 Nepal #12, 1997 294

Nepal #22, 1997 Nepal #23, 1997

Nepal #08, 1999 Nepal #06, 1999 298

Nepal #03, 1999 Nepal #02, 1999 300

Nepal #04, 1999 Nepal #13, 1999 302

Sicilia #48, 2008 Sicilia #47, 2008 304

Sicilia #42, 2008 Sicilia #43, 2008 next pages: Sicilia #44, #40, #41, 2008

Sicilia #45, 2008 Sicilia #46, 2008 next pages: Sicilia #30, #31, 2008

Sicilia #28, 2008 Sicilia #29, 2008 316

Sicilia #26, 2008 Sicilia #27, 2008 318

Sicilia #22, 2008 Sicilia #293 2008 320

Sicilia #19, 2008 Sicilia #05, 2008 322

Sicilia #04, 2008 Sicilia #09, 2008

Sicilia #01, 2008 Sicilia #10, 2008

Venezia #19, 2009 Venezia #21, 2009

Venezia #02, 2009 Venezia #03, 2009

Venezia #06, 2009 Venezia #07, 2009 332

La Habana #08, 2009 La Habana #13, 2009 334

La Habana #02, 2009 La Habana #03, 2009

PHOTOGRAPHY SOLO & GROUP SHOWS

Gipsoteca, 2006 - solo show - Despard Gallery, Hobart - Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin

Hollywood, 2005 - group show - Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre, Venezia

Cuba 95, 2003 - solo show - Despard Gallery, Hobart

Cuba, un Popolo, una Nazione, 2008 - solo show - Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre, Venezia

Multiversity, 2008 - group show- S.a.L.E. Magazzini del Sale, Venezia

Abbiamo Fatto Bene ad Uscire, 2008 - group show - S.P.A.C., Buttrio, Udine

Open Space, 2006 - group show - Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre, Venezia

Blank snap:shots, 2006 - group urban show - Bassano, Vicenza

Krossing Immaginodromo, 2009 - group show - Forte Marghera, Mestre, Venezia

Gipsoteca - solo show - Despard Gallery, Hobart 10.03_08.04 2006 Gipsoteca - solo show - Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin 02.06_22.07 2006

Gipsoteca by Laura Poletto, Venezia 2009

In 1994 Andrea Morruchio produced a photographic series based on Antonio Canova’s works, conserved within the Gipsoteca of the Museo Canoviano in Possagno. The surfaces of the plaster originals are cove-red with a constellation of small bronze cylinders – points de repère for their translation into marble. These became the very subject of a formal and emotional reinterpretation. Morucchio’s black and white photographs intensify this strongly anti-realistic1 technique - which extends like a network over the sur-faces of Canova’s bodies. These points are the participatory instruments of that “invisible geometry” of proportional and relational harmony amongst the parts with which, through a process of sublimation - “su-blime execution”, Canova realized his sculptures.

The photographic lens concentrates on accentuating the formal, expressive and sculptural qualities of the work, intensifying the gaze on the discovery and rediscovery of a muscular contraction, a gesture, a feeling, a fleeting thought passing over a face. Thus goes for the wrestlers, Creugante and Damosseno, as for the Pietà’s Christ, whose volumes are extrapolated and isolated, almost through a sort of abstracting process.

The close-up, the details and the succession of different framings of the same subject emphasize the psy-chological tension of the works, as well as the formal relations, the curves and bends of the profiles, the full and empty spaces. Almost like a slowed down vision, it revises itself through the succession of takes which are always based on a progressive shot by shot difference on the desperation, pain or gentleness. In the series of photographs of the Pietà, Le Grazie and of the small Platonic group of Amore e Psiche stanti, the lens focuses on the expressive, emotional and dynamic centre of the composition, and on that exquisitely fragile play of hands caressing and protecting a butterfly2 .

They are often sequences, almost like still frames of an action in progress, which manage to sensitively interpret the “movement” and the sensuality of the Canovian oeuvre - sculptures around which one circu-lates, which are always different depending on the point of view, that is, multi-focal. But Morucchio’s work establishes and accentuates a new relationship among the works through the studied measuring out of light and shadow, articulations of close-ups and mid-shots, defined by significant and graduated perspec-tives. He often uses the still life technique, while the emotion of a mute and precious dialogue - almost metaphysical – condenses itself in the photographs, taken in one of the areas conceived by Carlo Scarpa, where the natural light descends from the angular skylights, lapping and sliding over the sculptures of the Ninfa dormiente, the Naiade, the Monument to George Washington and the Self-portrait...

1 A. Corboz, Pigmalione servitore di due padroni (Introduzione a una esperienza che non avrà luogo), in Canova, a cura di S. Androsov,M. Guderzo, G. Pavanello, Museo Civico Possagno, Gipsoteca, Bassano del Grappa, 2003, p.13

2 F. Licht, Canova scultore, in op.cit., p.350

Gipsoteca, 2006, Galerie R. Junck works exposed: Gipsoteca series, 14 b/w prints on fibre paper, 20 x 30 cm and 50 x 60 cm

Gipsoteca, 2006, Despard Gallery, works exposed: Gipsoteca series, 11 b/w prints on fibre paper, 20 x 30 cm 370

Hollywood - group show - Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre, Venezia 26.11_12.12 2005curated by Interno3 & A. Morucchio

Antonio Canova’s Pietà, a work form the collection of Canova’s plaster casts, is the subject of A.M.’ intervention for Hollywood exhibition, The Main Show, which consists of the lateral positioning of three black and white photographic prints of the dead Christ, each one photographed at slightly varying angles.

The surfaces of Canova’s plaster sculptures are characteristically constellated with tiny indented bronze cylinders. Therefore, on whole, these points “scan” the volumes of the sculptural work, codifying canons of beauty connected to classical anatomical proportions. They act as a sort of measure of beauty, which decodes the aesthetic models still employed today by the communication mass media industry, be-it through the divas of Hollywood to advertisements of whatever sort.

Some events of the Gospel have produced dramatic archetypal figures and visions with which the visual arts have always been fascinated: the Madonna with Child, the Miracles, the Last Supper, the Passion, the Crucifixion and the Pietà. Cinema, as an image-generating mechanism which has given form and substance to themes from the Gospel, has forcefully taken its place in the history of the visual representations of Christ in the most diverse manners, from Pasolini to Mel Gibson.

The decision to use this religious subject as contribution to the Hollywood project, - reading Hollywood as the factory of spectacle which shapes global culture - comes from reflections on the notion that the Catholic religion has been and still is the most spectacular monotheistic religion. Moreover, this decision is backed by a simultaneous analysis of how the very structural action of the papal government is developing a programme of universal evangelization geared toward restoring and relaunching the centrality of the government of Rome with its dogmas and its theoretical targets, through the spectacular propaganda carried out by the late Pope Wojtyla, culminating in the spectacle of his death. The spectacle is the staging of the dead Pope, captured by thousands of video telephones and transmitted throughout the visual world via the global media system, as it is the dead Christ in the innumerable artistic representations, which over the course of art history, have given themselves to us as the Pietà.

But back to the photographic sequence of Canova’s Pietà, The Main Show, through a technical perceptive analysis strictly tied to the etymon of cinematography, the movement of the observer’s gaze from photo to photo, which perceives the slight variations of the subjects self-demonstration, given by the different angles of the shots, should activate in the observer a vision of a subject in movement, like that of a movie camera which laterally follows the movement of the subject being captured.

A bidirectional horizontal movement of the observer’s gaze, “activated” by the automatic search for/perception of the minimal variations in the images; the movement which follows a trail of invisible horizontal lines, connecting the same small points from image to image, exasperating the pathos of the represented event, and overcoming the usual iconic stasis with which it has been presented by the visual arts.

Hollywood, 2006, Galleria Contemporaneo, work exposed: The Main Show, 3 prints on fibre paper 50 x 60 cm each

Cuba 95 - solo show - Despard Gallery, Hobart 28.03_29.04 2003

Cuba by Elisa Capitanio, Venezia 2003

Cuba has been and still is a widespread dream. More than a place, it is a golden age, the time in which a primitive popular energy dashed forward to cross paths with History. For those who loved this surge and followed its heartrendering decline, Cuba is a myth. For those who have seen Cuba and wish to tell about it, their inevitable dread is rhetoric.

Beside his professional yearnings at that time, the choice of the reportage was, for Andrea Morucchio, his personal way of photographing and travelling. For three months he lived mingling with the locals, listening to them, yeilding to the rhythms of those lands, from city to city, St. Clara, Havana, Trinidad, Santiago, even over the mountains.

Paradoxically, the documentary medium, which is the most objective one, reveals itself as the most enthusiastic. In fact, it feeds on data that need to be gathered in the field, but only those “called” to do it will ever reach that field.

The proud stare of the transvestite looking at himself in the mirror before the performance, the stubborn industriousness of the workers in state-run factories or of those only distributing milk, coffee or cakes, the smug smile of the peluchador captured in his salon, the penetrating eyes of the santeras met in places of worship, the ever present children, especially in streetscapes: games, foreigners, arrests.

Each click is a fragment of a story that Morucchio did not just touch on but went as far as asking to be told and because of this he invested in the emotions and the curiosity that the photos are now giving back to us.

That it is not an aseptic reportage is also proven by the sensitivity in the composition. These photos are not poses but travel notes, and yet Morucchio took them, albeit without calculation, in a very precise instant: as soon as the image revealed itself through certain lines.

Not static ones but lines in a precarious balance, almost the directional lines in the movements of the gestures and gazes around which the story of the photo unfolds: those who know the work of Andrea Morucchio, who is also a scupltor, will easily recognize in them the dynamic tensions of his glass and iron shapes.

Cuba 95, 2003, Despard Gallery, works exposed: Cuba 95 series, 11 prints R3 Chrome on super gloss, 70 x 48 cm each

Cuba, un popolo, una nazione - solo show - Centro Candiani, Mestre, Venezia 09.02_16.03 2008

Cuba takes centre stage within the exhibition halls of the Candiani Cultural Centre, portrayed in its versatile and complex daily life by Andrea Morucchio, who visited the island for a prolonged period of time in 1995.

“Camouflaging” himself in the different environments, he set aside the semblance of his own inevitable artistic otherness, to immerse himself, as he states, in the “fluidity” of Cuban life. And perhaps for this reason, his photographs willingly avoid being either typically ideological or picturesquely folkloric.

They outline with expressive force, the elements of an empathetic tale of images; a tale that opens up rather than closes, almost as if each photograph contains within itself the narrative ingredients for new possible scenarios, barely hinted at, or rather, merely suggested.

Curious and proud of its own diversity and traditions, not only those revolutionary, Morucchios’s Cuba is a journey through eighty poses, capable of portraying the author’s emotions and visions - those visions which are never truly satisfied with reality. R. Ellero.

Eighty colour photographs recount a slice of reality from a direct yet subjective point of view. Though dependant on luck and valuing contingencies, each photograph holds within itself the rigour and precision of a technique in which the selection and framing always make the difference. The peculiarity of anonymity, just like the randomness of the encounter between subject-context-situation, succeeds in immortalizing the spirit of a nation. A. Zanchetta

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Cuba, un popolo, una nazione, 2008, Centro Candiani, works exposed: Cuba 95 series, 80 digital prints on Endura paper, 60 x 40 cm

379 380

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In the Pearl of the Antilles: in the Drift of the Iris catalogue text by Alberto Zanchetta Cuba un popolo una nazione, Candiani, Mestre, Venezia 2008

…it results that the photographic image - omnivorous mytho/techno-logical process – is located at the apex of the Cyclopic eye. Our culture is obsessed with recordable knowledge and by its diffusion, which then becomes reproduction of the real. For A.M., photography is much more than a simple means of communication. It is an experiential practice. This “communication” is intended to establish a transmission-relation with respect to the world.

Thus, it wishes to delineate a direct relationship between the photographer and his medium, and between these two and the people, objects and landscapes represented, until they identify with each other in perfect osmosis. As much as McLuhan recognized an extension of our perceptive faculties in the medium, the Canadian sociologist recriminated our inability to see ourselves in it, that is, our inability to accept the fact of being capable of belonging to it and it to us. A.M. proves that he has understood this, without minimum reserve.

A.M. does not accept to be subjected to the passivity of the snapshot, for which a click of the shutter suffices. Rather he demands the aware participation of all the factors that contribute to the definition of the event. It is this “participatory gaze” which does not permit him to document in a detached manner. The artist’s frame of mind, in fact, does not accept any type of disengagement. Eschewing aesthetic traps, A.M. avoids falling into stereotypes. From the pearl of the Antilles, with untiring willingness, the artist captures the pure and simple joy of the children, the routine of work, the serenity of the people, the calm of daily life.

In this Cuban reportage, he chases after a “being in/with the world” in first person, in order to interpret it from within and not be obliged to illustrate it from without. What matters in his research, first and foremost, is the conceding to be watched. This, at times, is the key to entering into contact with the subject. It permits the possibility of a face-to-face dialogue – no matter how voiceless – with that round eye - in the definition attributed to Cyclopses - which gazes with famished curiosity and amused complicity.

The quiet intrusion into the lives of others is further enriched by another factor, a nomadism that literally goes out to face the world, without ever judging or celebrating it. From this mobile and humble attitude, an evident shooting skill emerges. Though dependant on luck and valuing contingencies, each photograph holds within itself the rigour and precision of a technique in which the selection and framing always make the difference. The peculiarity of anonymity, just like the randomness of the encounter between subject-context-situation, succeeds in immortalizing the spirit of a nation.

Through A.M.’s photographs, we move from one neighbourhood to the next, from one individual to another, and from one to a thousand different situations, discovering contradictions, dreams and hopes, by means of which it becomes possible to delineate a psycho-geographic postcard. They are retinal stimuli that reconnect to the encephalon in order to return to the observer - the quality of - a gaze capable of triggering an amicable process, which then climaxes in empathy.

Multiversity - group show - S.a.l.e. Docks, Venezia 16.05_16.06 2008curated by Marco Baravalle

We, the chinese nation, have the spirit to fight the enemy to the last drop of our blood, the determination to recover our lost territory by our efforts, and the ability to stand on our own feet in the family of nations. The title of this photographic installation, produced for the Multiversity exhibition project, borrows from Mao Zedong’s words of 1935.

The concomitance of the exhibition period with that of the Chinese Regime’s violent repression of the Tibe-tan population, during the spring of 2008, determined the development of a work in which Mao’s famous words are connected to a series of six photographic images taken in Nepal: four black and white shots of Tibetan child monks in a Buddhist monastery alternated with two colour photographs of decapitated kids sacrificed within a Hindu temple to the goddess Kali.

Andrea Morucchio’s photographs were exhibited at S.a.l.e. in Venezia on the occasion of the exhibition-seminar Multiveristy or rather, the art of subversion. The other artists present in the exhibition were Mar-celo Exposito, Claire Fontaine and a group of militant cartographers. Andrea’s photo-series seemed both appropriate and necessary in order to show at least a minimal sensitivity toward the Tibet situation, but the choice of the work also included an evaluation of formal characteristics.

The contrast between black and white and colour prints, as well as the choice of the subjects and the raw-ness of the images, nonetheless manage to steer clear of the risk of an unsustainable rhetoric: It is precisely this absence of rhetoric which is, in my opinion, the resolving feature of We the Chinese people…, combi-ned with the balance of colour, typical of Andrea’s work, and with his unequaled photographic intuition, able to bind instantaneous impression with constituent data. - M. Baravalle

Multiversity, 2008, S.a.l.e. Docks, work exposed We the Chinese Nation... photographic installation, 4 b/w prints on fibre paper 40 x 60 cm each, 2 digital color prints on Endura paper 40 x 60 cm each

Abbiamo Fatto Bene ad Uscire - group show - curated by Paolo Toffolutti, S.P.A.C., Buttrio, Udine 14.12.2007_20.01.2008works exposed at first floor: Nepal series, 6 b/w prints on fibre paper, 7 digital color prints on Endura paper 25 x 38 cm each

Abbiamo Fatto Bene ad Uscire - group show - curated by Paolo Toffolutti, S.P.A.C., Buttrio, Udine 14.12.2007_20.01.2008work exposed at last floor: Cuba #27, 1 inkjet print on canvans 200 x 134 cm

Open Space - group show - curated by Alberto Zanchetta & Lara Facco, Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre, Venezia 18.11_10.12.2006work exposed: Cuba #27, 1 inkjet print on canvans 200 x 134 cm

Blank snap:shots - group show - curated by progettozeropiù, Piazza Guadagnino, Bassano, Vicenza 27.06_26.07 2003work exposed: Eidetic Bush, 3 inkjet prints on pvc 200 x 110 cm each

Krossing Immaginodromo - group show - Forte Marghera, Mestre, Venezia 07.06_22.11 2009collateral event 53. Biennale di Venezia

The title of the photographic triptych Improvviso terrore mi sospende il fiato e allarga nella notte gli occhi / A sudden terror halts my breath and widens my eyes in the night is derived from a poem by Camillo Sbarbaro. The work consists of a sequence of shots taken during a stormy night along the Malecòn of Havana, Cuba.

Improvviso Terrore by Marina Castrillo, Roma 2009

Is it water or mist? Dew or smoke? A violent and sudden wave or a soft and liquid caress? Am I flooded by light or darkness?

In the moment captured by the lens, the sea appears in many forms, tracing nocturnal white specters. It halts my breath… and I decipher water becoming mist in the air before my vision is completed, as I distantly perceive the sound of the wind and of waves against a rock.

Andrea Morucchio is able to seize ambiguous paths of perception from well-known landscapes such as that along the Malecón – a nighttime picture postcard of Havana- city of reddish earth, water and air daunting like spirits immersed in an ancestral fury, that awake and alarm eyes in the night.

The imaginary sound, the disappearing water, the spreading silence, the world that begins with the image and finishes in the observer, all of these end the visual spell of a unique Cuban stroll, so suggestive and yet so ordinary.

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Krossing Immaginodromo, Forte Marghera work exposed: Improvviso terrore mi sospende il fiato e allarga nella notte gli occhi, 3 inkjet prints on pvc 57 x 90 cm each

Andrea Morucchio, Venezia 1967

After receiving a degree in Political Science from the University of Padua, Andrea Morucchio (Venezia 1967) began his photographic career in 1989. In the mid-90s he produced an important body of work connected to prolonged stays in Cuba and Nepal. Since the end of the ‘90s, he has expanded his own linguistic research – often based on considerations of a socio-political nature – in various directions, from sculpture to installation, from video to photography and performance.

In 1996, in collaboration with C. Bianchin, he participated in the Carnet group show at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venezia) and in 2000 he had his first solo show, Dinamiche, curated by A. Pagnes at the Galleria Rossella Junck (Venezia) where he presented the initial core of his sculptural production (Blade and Enlightenments) and the following year he won the Diploma of Honour at the international sculpture competition held by the Jutta Cuny-Franz Memorial Foundation at the Musem Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf.

In 2002, he produced the environmental installation Percer-Voir at the Chiostri di San Pietro (Reggio Emilia) and participated in the Gemini Muse project, curated by V. Baradel at the Mocenigo Museum (Venezia) with the audiovisual installation Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno. That same year, he exhibited in the Vasi Comunicanti group show, curated by R. Bianconi and A. Pagnes at the Palazzo Mutilati, Verona.

In 2003 he was the artist in residence at the Claudio Alcorso Foundation at the Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart (Australia). His multimedia piece Eidetic Bush, inspired by the burnt forests of Tasmania, was presented in the Plimsoll Gallery in Hobart that same year. He also participated in the Fragile Beauty. Contemporary artists facing glass exhibition (curated by G.Iovane) at the Stiftung Starke in Berlin with the iron and glass Sidenlightenment sculpture.

In 2004, his public intervention Pulse Red made the Golden Globe of the Punta della Dogana pulsate with a red light on various nights, transforming the historic node of information into a symbol of the bombardment of mass-media messages. In 2005, Morucchio presented The Main Show for the Hollywood group show at the Galleria Contemporaneo (Mestre). Here he dealt with the spectacularization of Catholicism through a sequence of photographic frames of Canova’s Pietà in which the dead Christ is shot from different angles using kinetic effects.

The Emerging Code project (2006) hinges on the formal reinterpretation of Canova’s plasters and points de repère (reference points), used for the sculptural translation from plaster into marble. In Morucchio’s work, sculpture and photography interact in a process of abstraction of Canovian callimetry. The work was presented in two solo shows: at the Despard Gallery (Hobart) and the Rossella Junck Gallery (Berlin) in 2006.

During the same year, Morucchio participated in the Dis-Orders group show, curated by M. Baravalle at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venezia and at the Open Space exhibition, curated by L. Facco and A. Zanchetta, at the Candiani Cultural Centre, Mestre.

In 2007 he presented the Laudes Reagiae installation at the ex Convento dei Santi Cosma e Damiano on the Giudecca (Venezia). 2008 saw his participation in the review Notturni Dannunziani at the Giardini del Vittoriale with the video performance Sri Yantra, in which the artist filmed himself inhaling and exhaling, following the rhythm of a Tibetan mantra of disarticulated polyphony.

Among the videos dealing with critical socio-political issues are: Sabato italiano (2004), Talk Show (2005), and the audio-video projection of Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla (in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2008).

In 2008, he had a solo show, Cuba, un popolo una nazione, at the Candiani Cultural Centre (Mestre), de-dicated to his photographic work in Cuba (1995). In 2009, he participated in the 1st Floor exhibition (with F. Bianco and Interno 3) at the Liassidi Palace, Venezia, with an important group of sculptures (Accumulo, B[æ]d Time, Celata, Enlightenments). His works are preserved in the Museo del Vetro, Murano, Venezia and in the Museum of Old and New Art Hobart, Australia.

He has been the curator of various exhibitions and art projects, such as PetroLogiche (2004), dealing with issues regarding the Petrochemical factory in Marghera, Mars Pavilion (2005) at the Greenhouse of the Giardini di Castello, Venezia and the group show Hollywood at the Galleria Contemporaneo of Mestre (2005).

Solo projects & shows2009 Pulse Red - video installation - conceived for Outdoors, Fontego dei Tedeschi, Venezia2008 Sri Yantra - video-sound installation - conceived for Notturni Dannunziani, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia2008 Cuba un Popolo una Nazione - photography show - Candiani Cultural Centre, Mestre, Venezia2008 Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla - video-sound installation, urban intervents - conceived for Il Giorno della Memoria, Venezia2008 Tracciati Esistenziali - video installation - conceived for C_art, Campo Santa Margherita, Venice2007 Laudes Regiae - installation - ex Convento SS Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, Venice2006 Emerging Code - photography, sculpture show - Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin - Despard Gallery, Hobart2006 Gipsoteca - photography show - Kasia Kay Gallery, Chicago - Rossella Junck Gallery, Berlin - Despard Gallery, Hobart2004 Pulse Red - light projections - conceived for Borders, multimedia research into frontiers today, Punta della Dogana, Venezia2003 Eidetic Bush - video-sound installation - Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart2003 Percer_Voir #2 - installation - Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens, conceived for Ten Days on the Island art festival, Hobart2002 Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno - video-sound installation - conceived for Gemine Muse, Museo Mocenigo, Venezia2002 Percer_Voir - environnmental installation - Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia2000 Dinamiche - sculpture, video show - Rossella Junck Gallery, Venezia

Group shows2009 Mari contro Mari - sculpture - Archivio Storico, Pisa2009 Premio Internazionale La Colomba - photography - Ex Casino di Commercio, Venezia2009 Effimero - Sistemi di Contemporaneo - installation - Piazza San Lorenzo, Vicenza2009 Krossing Immaginodromo - photography - collateral event 53. Biennale di Venezia, Forte Marghera, Mestre, Venezia2009 1st Floor, F. Bianco, Interno3, A. Morucchio - sculpture - Liassidi Palace, Venezia2008 Notturni Dannunziani - photography, sculpture - Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia2008 Giunglavideo.3 - video - Villa Toppo Florio, SPAC, Space for Contemporary Art, Buttrio, Udine2008 Mari contro Mari - photography - Galata Museo del Mare, Genova2008 Arte Veneta tra Pasato e Futuro - photography - Castel Vecchio, Verona2008 Multiversity - photography - Magazzini del Sale, Sale Docks, Venezia2008 Contemporanea: l’Arte a Venezia per Emergency - photography - San Marco Auction House, Palazzo Giovanelli, Venezia2007 Abbiamo Fatto Bene ad Uscire - photography - SPAC, Space for Contemporary Art, Buttrio, Udine 2006 Julutstallning - sculpture, photography - Utställningssalongen Gallery, Stockholm2006 Open Space - photography - Candiani Cultural Centre, Mestre, Venezia2006 Dis-orders - video - Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Palazzetto Tito, Venezia2006 Glassdressing - sculpture - Museo di Cà Rezzonico, Venezia - Museo Revoltella, Trieste2005 Hollywood - photography - Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre, Venezia2004 Cool - sculpture - Primio Piano Gallery, Lecce2003 Isola Luminosa. Moretti, Morucchio, Venini - sculpture - Despard Gallery, Hobart2003 Snap:Shots, blank instructions for possibilities - photography - Piazza Guadagnini, Bassano, Vicenza 2003 Fragile! - sculpture - San Samuele Church, Venezia 2003 Fragile Beauty. Contemporary artists confronting glass - sculpture - Stiftung Starke, Berlin2002 Vasi Comunicanti - sculpture - Palazzo Mutilati, Verona2002 Opera Buona - sculpture - Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia2001 Il Lento Procedere - sculpture - Schola dei Tiraoro e Battioro, Venezia2000 Contemporary glass artists, France and Venice compared - sculpture - Borromeo Castle, Lago Maggiore, Varese1996 Carnet - photography - Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation Gallery, Venezia

Recognitions2005 MONA Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, acquisition of sculptures Blade #10 and Enlightenments #32003 Claudio Alcorso Foundation Artist in Residence, Tasmanian School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart2001 Honorary Diploma awarded by the 8th Jutta Cuny-Franz Foundation Memorial, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf2001 Glass Museum, Murano, Venezia, acquisition of sculpture Enlightenments #5

Bibliography

Dinamiche, curated by A. Pagnes, Galleria Rossella Junck, Venezia, 2000Fragile Beauty. Contemporary artists facing glass curated by G. Iovane, Marco Polo Gallery, Venezia 2001Opera Buona, curated by M. Paderni, Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia 2002 Gemine Muse, young artists in italian museum, curated by V. Baradel, Torino 2002Art Addiction, 100 contemporary artists, curated by P. Russu, World of Art Books, Stockholm 2003Eidetic, curated by N. Frankham, Tasmanian School of Art, Claudio Alcorso Foundation, Hobart 2003 Fragile! curated by A. Dorigato, Chiesa San Samuele, Trieste Contemporanea, Venezia 2003 Italian Artists’ Annual 2004, Three Wise Owls Art & Publishing, Singapore 2004Borders, multimedial research into frontiers today, curated by A. Fonda, Patagonia Art, Venezia 2005Hollywood, curated by Interno3, A. Morucchio, Galleria Contemporaneo, Mestre, Venezia 2005Dis-orders, curated by M. Baravalle, Palazzetto Tito, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venezia 2006 Glassdressing, curated by G. Carbi, Museo di Cà Rezzonico, Venezia - Museo Revoltella, Trieste 2006 Emerging Code, Despard Gallery, Hobart 2006 (texts by M. Baravalle, N. Frankham, S. Simi de Burgis)Open Space, curated by L. Facco, A. Zanchetta, Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre, Venezia 2006Laudes Regiae, ex Convento S.S. Cosma e Damiano, Venezia 2007 (texts by M. L. Brunelli, B. Caccia, M. Frara, P. Toffolutti, S. Viscardi)Cuba, un popolo una nazione, Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre, Venezia 2008 (texts by R. Ellero, A. Zanchetta)Arte Veneta tra passato e futuro, curated by A. Zanchetta, Castelvecchio, Verona 2008Notturni Dannunziani, curated by M. Riccioni, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia, 2008 La pittura nel Veneto. Il Novecento. Dizionario degli artisti, curated by N. Stringa, Electa, Milano, 2009

Andrea Morucchio the Book

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