Enzo Cucchi

Enzo Cucchi was born in 1949 in Morro d‘Alba, a farming village in the province of Ancona in central Italy. As an autodidactic painter Cucchi was lauded in his early years even though he was more interested in poetry. He frequently visited poet Mino De Angelis, who was in charge of the magazine Tau. Through La Nuova Foglio di Macerata, a small publishing house, he met with art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, an important figure in the artist‘s prospective career. In its catalogues La Nuova Foglio di Macerata published writings of artists such as Cucchi's Il veleno è stato sollevato e trasportato! in 1976. Frequent trips to Rome in the mid-seventies revived Cucchi’s interest in visual arts. He moved to Rome, temporarily abandoned poetry and dedicated himself exclusively to the visual arts. Here Cucchi met with different artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino and Nicola de Maria with whom he began to work in close contact and to establish dialectical and intellectual dialogues.

Achille Bonito Oliva was the first to name this young generation of Italian artists of the seventies as a group: In Flash Art Magazine, no. 92-93, 1979, he used the term Transavanguardia for the first time. The official proclamation of the Transavanguardia took place at the Venice Biennial of 1980. The term was an idiom for the art of this young generation following the Avant-garde art of the sixties. These artists no longer sought to evoke discomfort in the spectator by all means and to force him to go beyond the work to grasp it fully. This new generation did not follow the restless quest for progress that did not allow any consideration of past traditions and for devising a language with which artists could state their attitude, opposing the current political system and society‘s deceasing values.

The members of the Transavanguardia-group may have nothing in common but their native country – as it seems – since each artist has his own working method: There are neither rules nor any binding language of expression. Nevertheless we can find fundamental bridging elements such as motifs gathered from imaginable reality and the free use of past and present with no preclusion but with references open to all directions without any constrictions and with no obligation to invent anything new. Every artist found his own way to create images/works as ciphers with an open symbolism, enigmas with any solution or with various solutions. Cucchi radicalises painting practice, taking the picture as an opportunity to accumulate and combine various elements, figurative and abstract, explicit and allusive. He develops his own specific kind of symbolism with suggestive forms which are mostly somehow linked with the landscape, the legends and the traditions of his home-region but also through a rapturous richness of colour. Hence some works may evoke old myths and legends, but Cucchi uses them only to express his feelings and imaginations. Cucchi obtains a suggestive strength from nature, history and culture, which he shows in a playful relationship with our technical world, using symbols like a train or an ocean-liner and employing colour in terms of idea, expansion and motion rather than for pictorial sensation. Cucchi allows his image total freedom of movement in all directions. Evoking astonishment and confusion, Cucchi does not aim to name, quote or prove anything, his pictorial language may be related only to his personal wishes, dreams and hopes while at the same time he experiences with the impetus of anonymity and of the impersonal. His artwork is often accompanied by poetic texts some of which have been published.

From the beginning of the eighties on, Cucchi has been gaining international recognition as a representative of the new figurative expression. Aside from the numerous Transavanguardia- group-exhibitions, he had one-man-shows in galleries, museums and cultural sites all over the world.

(Source: Wikipedia)