2013 – Danilo Bucchi – EMMEOTTO GALLERY – Rome

DANILO BUCCHI

a cura di Gianluca Marziani

dal 18 aprile al 1 giugno 2013

Tracing a black line, which flows like a path inside and beyond reality. Drawing an imaginative line, which starts from languages and goes through cities, experiences, interactions, memories, other languages… Danilo Bucchi is back in Rome with a solo exhibition which resembles the description above: a sort of diary collecting variously-sized portraits with a protean physiognomy, resulting from a metabolic process which involves the external world. Bucchi and his own multiplicity: the fluid sign of syringes replacing paintbrushes; dolls as favourite subjects of an almost theatrical body, sculpture as a new medium which is meant to broaden the horizons of language. Aluminium, paper and canvas are the metabolising surfaces of Bucchi’s recitative figuration: a motionless dance involving his restless and pensive humankind, his volumetric self-portrait and his dolls, hybrid creatures between the Kabuki theatre and fabric puppets. Inside the concentric and immersive, floating and cosmic, evocative and recognisable worlds created by Bucchi, the real world undergoes a transformation: here the souls of the author, replete with suggestions from movies, comics, fashion and design, literature and technology, merge with each other– many souls whose genes blend together in front of their iconographical destiny, where references fade away and yield to the destiny of a new visionary identity.

THE SCULPTURE
Today the first sculpture by Bucchi, which is the fruit of methodical patience and high figurative quality, is seeing the light of day, after two years of meticulous work. Its realisation required the combination of manual dexterity and technology. The result is a protean photofit, where the roots of the artist’s physiognomy, carved into aluminium, spread figurative hints. This multiple profile, built through a selection of overlapping hints, is centred on a “prime suspect”, namely Danilo Bucchi himself. A three-dimensional self-portrait, where the author describes himself through his posture, his clothes, his hat. And where one detail, the charge on his back, becomes a denotative and connotative key, a sort of dynamic logo reinforcing the bond between the work and the observer.

THE DOLLS
They represent an essential component in Bucchi’s artistic trajectory. Their pictorial presence embodies the playful and feminine dimension, through figurative codes which put the emphasis on the naturalness of their faces and the artificiality of their eyes. These melancholy dolls have awe-inspiring eyes and Beckettian faces, reminiscent of silent performances: they stare at us, revealing their mesmerising sensuality. They incarnate the “feminine” side of a highly emotional painting, permeated by inner suggestions and recognisable codes. Here the artist’s most meditative side emerges: the colours fill the perimeters, measuring the intensity of feelings and exploring moods and their sensorial modulation.

THE CIRCLE
The continuous black circle, realised with syringes instead of brushes, is featured in different versions, ranging from large sizes to notebook sheets: dimensional poles of a narrative vision, where interior voices, related stories, relational keys, humanoid genders blend with each other. Bucchi’s driving force lies in the circle, the primary figure of childish painting, but also of Giotto’s developments, of Klee’s and Kandinsky’s abstractionism, of Zorio’s and Mattiacci’s Arte Povera installations…we could go back and forth through art history, finding endless clues which would further reassert the circle as a “brick for elaboration”. Bucchi’s sign rotation now becomes a tangle of figure, mass and narration, a sort of organic perimeter developing physicality by subtraction, through the white backdrop. Now, synthesis turns into a reinvention of the world through the simplicity of the primordial line. Now, there are black men who do not frighten us, but induce us to think. Now, the white backdrop is the new black of unveiled darkness. Now, signs reveal the soul of a special eye.