“Art is part of man’s quest for grace; sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure.”

In Enzo Cucchi’s art, the image is the fire that determines the temperature of the work; that brings a whole variety of materials and techniques to combustion and ultimately leads to bedazzlement; that underpins his particular kind of eroticism, the result of a desire supported by an economy other than that of day-to-day life.¹ The strength of Cucchi’s work lies in presenting itself effortlessly in the magnificence of attire that avows natural abandon. 

In this small oil and lead on canvas painting in the Cerruti Collection, there are evident processes of hybridising elements, typical of the Transavangardia movement to which Cucchi belonged. A ghostly figure walks through a rough, inhospitable, montanous landscape. Behind him, to his left, is a white rose and before him, to his right, a second white rose suggests that time is circular, non-linear. Stylised black crows appear in geometrical white areas of painting. 

“Art is part of man’s quest for grace; sometimes his ecstasy in partial success, sometimes his rage and agony at failure.”² 

It is above all ecstasy that captures Cucchi the artist, the particular and necessary state that allows him to bear the disguise of image in the condition of an epiphany. On the one hand, the image generates an imbalance between itself and those external to it. On the other, after displaying its difference, it goes on to produce a state of integration through ecstasy that alters our relations with reality. Art has a corrective inner nature that enables it to regulate the explosive act of its initial apparition and establish a socialising relationship in the moment of contemplation. Only a solitary figure populates Cucchi’s landscape and this painting suggests a world with no vitality. But the imaginary expresses its charge of totality, the need to drag the root of life, i.e. death, into its swirling motion too. For Cucchi, being alive means precisely broadening the field of an iconography of everyday life that eliminates death and illness so as to ensure control over the realm of existence. 

For Cucchi, the function of art is precisely to corrupt obstacles through the vital decomposition of images that - like Matryoshka dolls - contain unforeseeable dynamics, open to an economy that is not guaranteed by any form, but is polluted by a cupio dissolvi that overturns everything through the vitality of art. Friedrich Nietzsche spoke of a joy in art that bears the delight of destruction within it.³ Artists, by constitution, start from a landscape of ruins. Thence alone can they set out also with a constructive intent. For Cucchi, art requires a pre-emptive catastrophe capable of eliminating what exists and reducing it to the cordiality of ruins to be manipulated subsequently with the tools of art that move freely through these ruins. 

While creative power cannot invent anything out of nothing, it can humanly assemble elements extraneous to one another. “We must also be able to rise above morality, to soar above it and play, rather than just being paralysed with anxiety like someone terrified of slipping and falling at any moment.”⁴ 

In this Nietzschean sense, Cucchi’s work moves in the form of an internal wave that disrupts his landscapes and subjects them to combustion, that knows no laws of gravity. The fluidity of Osvaldo Licini’s paintings and the figurative density of Scipione are amongst his sources. 

Gravity means anchorage to rules of moral safety that art neither knows nor wishes to know, as it will not permit itself to be guaranteed by any preexisting value or status quo. 

The work of art thus becomes the tool that digs into ruins and reassembles found objects in accordance with laws of “perennial sway” assimilable to no statics of order. 

Achille Bonito Oliva 

This painting, formerly in the collection of the wellknown Roman art dealer Cleto Polcina, was acquired by Francesco Federico Cerruti from the gallery of Erica Ravenna Fiorentini at the end of the 1990s [Ed.].

¹ This text is inspired by Bonito Oliva 1987, pp. 99-105; A. Bonito Oliva, “Transavanguardia: davanti c’è il bel canto, dietro la tortura”, in Rivoli 2002-03, pp. 26-29 [Ed.].

² G. Bateson, “Stile, grazia e informazione dell’arte primitiva” [1967], in Verso un’ecologia della mente [1972] 2000.

³ Nietzsche 1983.

⁴ Id. 2015, §107.