PUZZLING IDENTITIES | ANDREA MORUCCHIO | PORTRAITS 2018-2022 by Andrea Morucchio

PUZZ LING IDEN TITIE S ANDREA MORUCCHIO

PUZZLING IDENTITIES ANDREA MORUCCHIO PORTRAITS 2018-2022

texts

Toni Toniato

Puzzling. The image is other, also

Laura Cornejo Brugués Beyond the face. Puzzling Pop and Fantastic Portrait, the contemporary portrait

Stefano Cecchetto Metamorphosis. Puzzling identity

works

FANTASTIC PORTRAIT

PUZZLING POP

PUZZLING RENAISSANCE

Curriculum vitae

“Approaching the work of Andrea Morucchio means entering a protean creative dimension - apparently disorienting, perhaps - which has been forming in a broad horizon of research. In fact, for more than two decades the artist has used the mediums of photography, sculpture, installation, video and performance in a continuous experimentation of expressive, experiential dimensions and creations of meaning.” This premise, made explicit by Laura Poletto in the introductory text to the monograph “Morucchio” published by Bugno Art Gallery - remains very valid for knowing and understanding the turning point, today, impressed by the new direction of research that characterizes the artist’s works - perhaps those among his most “pictorial” - albeit in the immateriality of an “electronic” painting founded at the same time on the construction of computerized algorithms and on the extraordinary prerogatives of a sensitivity as sharp as it is reflective, as alarmed as it is alarming. And with this, verifying and essentially manifesting a thought, precisely, of the image in its making itself as a “sign” of oneself and of the other. Thus he once again depicts an alterity that is constitutive of the image, or rather ontological, the same alterity that presides in a radically dialectical manner over all his work, every aspect of his intriguing and multiple creative processes. And which, now, in the “portraits” or “flowers” depicted here - modelsmanifesto, on the one hand, of the painting of Leonardo da Vinci and, on the other, of that of Andy Warhol, from which the artist deliberately takes reference, appropriating them for a tribute or a reinterpretation that is anything but conventional - also demonstrates that it introduces and therefore holds a dialogue of unpredictable but also intriguing correspondences. But in the same way it opens up a whirling visual and philosophical labyrinth of conceptual interactions and imaginative meanings, using both surprising metonyms and illuminating metaphors to express and convey both seductive figurative evocations and disturbing poetic allusions. On the other hand, there are many elements that constitute the linguistically original aspects of his recent works, visually hinged in an image weave that reveals itself as a puzzle, at once structuring and deconstructing the “figures”, merging the analogue and the digital, so that the very weave here of the image - the magnetizing appeal of the image - cannot be, in the end, other than the very form of its original duplicity. This is what it is about and this is what it shows, as if to signify something both absolutely defined and indefinable - art really does have the power to think the unthinkable - and this is where the creative impulse that animates the series of current “representations” also ventures, far removed from any complacent decorative performance and any playful entertainment.

Perhaps a less obvious approach would be, for the moment, not to stop at the obvious notoriety of these historical ‘icons’, some of which have even become ‘stereotypes’ and are used as such by the most fashionable advertising - and moreover reproduced now, with virtually simulative means - and not even to give in to their merely perceptive effects or to the empathy that drives us to lose ourselves in the exuberance even of suggestions that are as aestheticising as they are emotionally gratifying. In fact, behind the eloquent but deceptive redundancy of those overused citations, marvellously free, however, from any inevitable visual entropy, one is nonetheless disconcerted and fascinated by the sorcery of the conceptual and experimental devices at work in the creation of these works. Far from being mere quotations, the “figures” shot in the artist’s targeted poses are presented in such a way as to unhinge and trap the pretended certainties of perception; rather, they are duplicated images, indeed bifrontal or, better, multi-dimensional, so that the spectator’s gaze is lured, remains “ensnared”, thus attracted into the “network” of their factual chains of structuring and signification. From this arises the complexity of resonances and references set up in these mirror-images (not unlike the neuronal ones) and to this function, if one observes well, even revelatory of the archetypal semblance of the hermaphrodite concealed in Leonardo’s enchanting female portraits and of the commodified and regressive polysemy pertaining to certain mass “myths” obsessively anticipated and exalted by Warhol. As it is all too easy to see, Morucchio re-produces famous “icons” - ostentatiously entered, moreover, in the worn-out enjoyment of the collective imagination, on rather, they have ritually become fetishes of the growing visual bulimia (from omnivorous advertising to the irresistible narcissism in the childish recourse to the selfie). Here, however, those icons are represented through a sort of conceptual and perceptive “anamorphosis”, the formulation of which allows the artist to deliberately deviate from any peremptory assertiveness, which is entirely tautological; on the contrary, he manages to insinuate, through imperceptible modifications of the figural texture, further captious perspectives, even managing to merge and combine in the same structuring articulation the stereotyped lexicon of pop art and the perceptive grammar of op art, digital photography and pixel painting.

Toni Toniato

Within the multidisciplinary and experimental artistic research that distinguishes Andrea Morucchio’s professional career, the idea of beauty in a given space-time context represents one of the cores of his aesthetic investigations. However, this idea is cultivated with a genuine creative purpose: to conceive of art as the last stronghold where it is possible to exercise social and cultural criticism today, or free expression in a society made distrustful by the prevailing disinformation. With such a humanistic sense of the work, the “Puzzling Pop” project acquires a broad semantic coherence, innovating the legacy of Pop Art, a movement pioneering in denouncing the alienation of the homologated and standardized communication systems of consumer society. Using citation and revisionist strategies, Morucchio operates on Andy Warhol’s famous portraits of media icons, using a digital collage technique - the juxtaposition of photographic fragments of butterfly wings - with which he deconstructs the morphology of the faces. The subjects are given a new visual texture, due to the chromatic alterations and expressive traces of a puzzle that renews their sense of individuality. Morucchio, interested in both the retinal image and its symbolic lexicon, re-proposes the ontology of the portrait in its constant mutation and dissimilarity that does not allow any cultural or historical image to be fixed with absolute precision, where the potential of “being in its uniqueness” resides in alterity and versatility. Puzzling Pop’s works invite us to rethink concepts intrinsic to the practice of portraiture such as identity, subjectivity, temporality, and reality through a creative dialectic between appearance and concealment that challenges our visual thinking. The “Fantastic Portrait” series constitutes a new declination of the portrait to which the artist devotes his undeniable virtuosity with the composition of grotesque heads composed of the same tiles used in the creation of “Puzzling Pop”. The intention is both to creatively reflect nature with butterfly wings and to approach the character of the subjects with works that “portray” the union between nature and the human psyche; beyond its representational canons, the creepy transfiguration of the face under the effect of optical illusionism reveals its animating being. Andrea Morucchio is the creator of these dreamlike and unconscious images with a static and hallucinated gaze, which become the expression of a journey into the tradition of the fantastic in Western art and new readings of a Dada-surrealism, but above all of concerns of the moment carried out with great inventiveness and precision, not without the playful pleasure of art. Laura Cornejo BrugUés

Fragments, pieces, layers, bits of images that get mixed up only to come back together again in the altered identity of a figure that is “other”, that evokes the original, confirms it, but reintreprets it at the same time. In his recent works, Andrea Morucchio is looking for a point of contact, an encounter with the great painting of the Renaissance and Baroque in order to verify the existence of a relationship with art of the past. But a search for something new cannot and must not go against tradition; if anything it has to provide different keys of interpretation in order to see it again, to bring it back to the contemporary. This is an objective that Morucchio already dealt with in the 2015 installation: “The Rape of Venice”, in the rooms of Palazzo Mocenigo during the 56th Venice Biennale. Instead, here on this ocassion the artist has created a carpet made up of fragments of mosaic flooring from Saint Mark’s Cathedral and he has recreated it in a sort of a visual puzzle which invokes themes of the labyrinth. In this “decomposition” and in the different recomposition of the geometric pattern of the flooring of Saint Mark’s, Morucchio locates a state of precarious balance and confirms the innate tendency of the artist to produce order through the continuous research of simple forms, which is the primary function of Abstractionism. This is almost a metaphor for the human dynamic, for a new visual perception of reality. The “iconic” images from Renaissance painting, that are individuated by Morucchio, are then re-elaborated in a process of chromatic fragmentation which declares its identity; they become decomposed visions and they are restituted in fragile chipped elements, like pieces of memory that return after a deleterious explosion. The time and space of this restitution comes about all within the modern concept of the pixel, a elaboration tool of the sensitive data of the images. But the characteristics that govern this singular ars combinatoria are generated by the personal poetics of the artist who is able to fuse different concepts and arrange them into solutions and models of a rare aesthetic refinement. Morucchio works on sensorial fragments which suggest the extinction of any type of closed form and suggest unusual trajectories, iconic warping and a type of thinking in which it is possible to lose oneself in citations and references. The painting is a deforming mirror which dislocates vision, modifies proportions and the asychronous nature of perception until there is a glimpse of a possibility of a surface which reflects the past and projects it onto the immediate future. The references go from Leonardo to Botticelli, from Giorgione to Titian which all enter into the halls of suggestions with an ideological slant, with the stereotype of already worn-out images of aesthetic consumerism, and thereby easily interpretatable by the larger public. Morucchio’s distinction lies is his ability to bring these references into a different type of interpretative philosophy which interrupts the temporal circle to open up towards the ever wider territories of modern language. Stefano Cecchetto

FA N T ASTIC PORT RAIT

Fantastic Portrait n° 001 Puzzling Beauty series 58x44,5 cm Giclee print, Hahnamühle photo rag ultra smooth 305 gr unique piece 2022

Fantastic Portrait n° 001 details

Fantastic Portrait n° 002 Puzzling Beauty series 58x44,5 cm Giclee print, Hahnamühle photo pearl paper, 310 gr unique piece 2022

Fantastic Portrait n° 002 detais

Fantastic Portrait n° 006 Puzzling Beauty series 64x50 cm LightJet print, Kodak Pro Endura, 250 gr unique piece 2022

Fantastic Portrait n° 006 details

Fantastic Portrait n° 005 Puzzling Beauty series 64x50 cm LightJet print, Kodak Pro Endura 250 gr unique piece 2022

Fantastic Portrait n° 005 details

Fantastic Portrait n° 004 Puzzling Beauty series 64x50 cm LightJet print, Kodak Pro Endura 250 gr unique piece 2022

Fantastic Portrait n° 004 details

PUZ Z LING P O P

Ali Puzzling Pop series Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Muhammad Ali different sizes print on aluminium || print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass edition of 3 2020

Ali Puzzling Pop series details

Mao Puzzling Pop series Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Mao Zedong different sizes print on aluminium || print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass edition of 3 2020

Mao Puzzling Pop series details

Venere Puzzling Pop series Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Venere di Botticelli different sizes print on aluminium || print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass edition of 3 2020

Venere Puzzling Pop series details

Marilyn 01 Puzzling Pop series Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe different sizes print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass edition of 3 2019

Marilyn 01 Puzzling Pop series details

Marilyn 02 Puzzling Pop series Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe different sizes print on aluminium || print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass edition of 3 2020

Marilyn 02 Puzzling Pop series details

Marilyn 03 Puzzling Pop series Revisiting Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe different sizes print on aluminium || print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass edition of 3 2020

Marilyn 03 Puzzling Pop series details

PUZ Z LING RENA ISSA N C E

Leda e il Cigno Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Paolo Veronese’s Leda e il Cigno 100x100 cm digital print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass unique piece 2022

Leda e il Cigno Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series details

La Fornarina Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Raffaello Sanzio’s La Fornarina 100x70,6 cm digital print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass unique piece 2020

La Fornarina Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series details

Santa Caterina d’Alessandria Puzzling Baroque Portrait series Revisiting Giovanni Ricca’s Santa Caterina d’Alessandria 110x90 cm digital print on ultraHD Fuji paper, acrylic glass unique piece 2020

Santa Caterina d’Alessandria Puzzling Baroque Portrait series details

La Belle Ferronnière Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronnière 90x60 cm digital print on aluminium unique piece 2019

La Belle Ferronnière Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series details

Vergine delle Rocce Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s Vergine delle Rocce 90x83 cm digital print on aluminium unique piece 2019

Vergine delle Rocce Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series

details

Ginevra de’ Benci Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s Vergine delle Rocce 90x88,5 cm digital print on aluminium unique piece 2019

Ginevra de’ Benci Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series details

Monna Lisa Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s Monna Lisa 77x53 cm digital print on ultraHD paper, acrylic glass edition of 20 2018

Monna Lisa Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series details

L’Angelo Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series Revisiting Tiziano Vecellio’s L’Angelo 100x85 cm digital print on pvc unique piece 2018

L’Angelo Puzzling Renaissance Portrait series details

Andrea Morucchio (Venice 1967)

After receiving a degree in Political Science from the University of Padua, Andrea Morucchio began his photographic career in 1989. 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 his career, Morucchio has practised the most diverse instruments and genres of contemporary artistic research, using the new media of visual communication in a prestigious way, adapting them each time to his own ideas and existential experiences. He has been able to see with new eyes, even managing to hybridise different languages into a magnificent material and expressive composite - through refined alchemy and mental subtleties: figures, sounds, gestures, words, but remaining, despite the variety of formal solutions, coherent with the instances of a thought of the image, of the image of nature and life, of things and the world, investigating with equal inexorable lucidity, both the recesses of the psyche and the dramas of existence. His works are preserved in the Museo del Vetro / Glass Museum, Murano, Musei Civici, Venezia, in the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia in the Provenance Collection, Tacoma, in the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, Dhaka, at MUPA Museo del Paesaggio, Torre di Mosto, Venezia and at Islington Collection, Hobart.

solo shows AND INSTALLATION PROJECTS 2022 Re-Flooring | multimedia installation | Watermark by Euroinnovators, Isola delle Rose, JW Marriot, Venezia. 2020 Venezia Anno Zero | video projection | Bottega Cini, Fondazione Archivio Vittorio Cini, Venezia. 2019 Puzzling. The Image is Something Else, too | solo show - digital art | Galleria L’Occhio, Venezia. 2017 FermoImmagine - Porto Marghera | solo show - photography | Museo del Paesaggio, Torre di Mosto. 2015 The Rape of Venice | multimedia installation | MUVEContemporaneo, Palazzo Mocenigo, MUVE Musei Civici Venezia. 2014 Terre in Vista | installation | Dialoghi Celesti, MUPA Museo del Paesaggio, Torre di Mosto, Venezia. 2014 Play God | multimedia installation | Nuova Icona, Oratorio San Ludovico, Venezia. 2013 Andrea Morucchio Skulpturen | solo show - sculpture | Galerie an der Pinakothek der Moderne, München. 2013 Endless Journey | solo show - photography | Modern Gallery, Stockholm. 2011 Back in Black | solo show - sculpture, digital art, video | Ca’ Pesaro, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, MUVE Musei Civici Venezia. 2009 Pulse Red | video installation | Outdoors, Fontego dei Tedeschi, Venezia. 2008 Cuba un Popolo una Nazione | solo show - photography | Centro Culturale Candiani, Mestre. 2008 Verso il Paese dei Fumi e delle Urla | urban intervention, video projection + sound | Shoah Memory Day, Campo San Bartolomeo, Venezia. 2008 Sri Yantra | video-sound installation | Notturni Dannunziani, Vittoriale degli Italiani, Gardone, Brescia. 2007 Laudes Regiae | multimedia installation | ex Convento Santi Cosma e Damiano, Giudecca, Venezia. 2006 Emerging Code | solo show - sculpture, digital art | Galerie Rossella Junck, Berlin - Despard Gallery, Hobart. 2004 Pulse Red | urban intervention, light projection | Borders, Multimedial Research into Frontiers Today, A plus A Gallery, IUAV, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. 2003 Percer-Voir 02 | installation | Ten Days on the Island, Royal Botanical Gardens, Hobart. 2003 Eidetic Bush | video-sound installation | Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart. 2002 Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno | video-sound installation | Gemine Muse. Young Artists in Italian Museums, Museo Mocenigo, Venezia. 2002 Percer-Voir 01 | installation | Opera Buona, Chiostri di San Pietro, Reggio Emilia. 2000 Dinamiche | solo show - sculpture, video | Galleria Rossella Junck, Venezia.