Emanuele Marcuccio extends his own impulses toward the view through various formats. His primary concerns are split between scenography, invention, and production. In this exhibition, shooting star-comet hybrids populate seven black and blue boards, dancing between photographs of an automotive standstill. In an effort to build upon an obscure narrative, he creates and arranges the two series to the point where a relationship is established, yet remains beyond direct clarification. While he pursues his sculptural output within the framework of industrial manufacturing, Marcuccio’s photographs function as poetic counterpoints to their material sympathizers. Each image and form drifts from atomization to contextualization during the process of viewing.
With their outright objecthood, Marcuccio’s sculptures broach Martin Heidegger’s position on the “thingness of things,” as they elide pure function in favor of demonstrating their material position. Skirting questions of virtue, these objects alternatively expose natures of being, artifice, and perceptibility. Marcuccio doesn’t mimetically produce comets, but refers to their logic of shape and transmits impressions of the Real. His pliable forms irrefutably exist in space and, as such, confront the viewer with dimensionality and surface quality.
A comet is not a star, but it reacts to them, and is bolstered by their light. The wallbound and material situations of these sculptures communicate the distinction–they reflect without sparkling, counter to the lingering balls of gas spattered throughout the night sky. Marcuccio has merged stars and comets through formal and written language, attaching the latter by way of titles and evoking the former through shape. Suspended and slumped, Marcuccio’s objects are caught between levitation and gravitational pull. It’s important that the symbolism of the subject is also observed. Their latex format doesn’t block the allusions between celestial bodies and dreams, wishes, fame, guidance, and the like. These matters are inscribed within the subject, yet not so overt as to overwhelm the sculptures absolutely. Furthermore, each supple object becomes a character, exerting texture and presence, prone to squeezing and impact.
In terms of reference, Marcuccio is clearly attuned to Claes Oldenburg’s progressive soft sculptures. Despite his formal connections to the Pop artist, though, Marcuccio opts to represent the unobtainable ornaments of night. Likewise, he skirts references to the body, commerce, and domesticity in favor of the virtually intangible cosmos. Marcuccio maintains an interest in another modernist conceit–that of the monochrome. In previous iterations of his sculptural series, the magnetic pillows were attached to color-matched surfaces. Here, he breaks with continuity, engaging new chromatic agendas.
The photographs on view were captured by Marcuccio while stuck in traffic in a loaned car. They operate as windows into other places, expanding the confines of the viewing room. The artist habitually leverages this medium to provide background to the sculpture; Intermedium corollaries punctuate each presentation. While the objects are materialized hallucinations, the romantic hallucinations of daydreams that one experiences in traffic are alluded to here. This phantasmic aspect is the bridge that connects Marcuccio’s dual investigations, whereby forms and images communicate the artist’s investments in realizing narrative plots and negotiating objects. Notably, this effort refers back to Oldenburg’s referential methods. According to Barbara Haskell, the modernist’s sculptures “function as a concentrated symbol, defining places by condensing their meaning into objects that may refer to the physical nature of the places” as well as “the emotions and history of the places.” Under modified conditions, Marcuccio’s photographs orbit a similar framework, yet bear a more sentimental tone: transmitting a particular time, a place, a feeling into the gallery.
Parallel stories thus materialize as Marcuccio converts the gallery space into another one by referencing external contexts. Accordingly, the exhibition happens in its staging–an extension of the artist’s studio work. Very little is prescribed, Marcuccio merely enters the zone, situating and manipulating things until satisfaction is achieved. Each show functions as an external analysis of the self. It can be difficult to see the production in process, but in retrospect a certain understanding is achieved.
Text by Reilly Davidson
Emanuele Marcuccio (b. 1987, Italy) was born in Veneto to a family of Apulian descent, giving rise to an accent that retains the worst aspects of both inflections. The industrial tradition of the northeast accustomed him from an early age to the prospect of a life as an entrepreneur, but life's instances led him to become involved in art. To make up for his nostalgia for a more productive and less self-aggrandizing world, his art will often rely on local steel production, with which he shares the same formal priorities and desire for efficiency and industriousness. The war on formal approximation is the aspect that most characterizes Marcuccio's practice, despite the fact that the human tragedy of production as perpetration shines through in each of his pieces making it deeply human. An atavistic dissatisfaction with the fate of art will lead him in 2020 to open an exhibition space in Milan together with his business partner Daniele Milvio, with whom he shares the need to liberate the muses from the intellectual poverty and paucity caused by the professionalization of art practice and the proliferation of bad schools. Humans shall not live by paintings alone, Marcuccio shows us the many possibility of manifestation that we have in this world, according to the possibilities given by contingency, whether it is a fashion shoot, a curated exhibition in a commercial gallery, an exhibition of his own, the priority does not change: fighting for the health of the discussion. This impetus is not new, many before him have experienced art as a calling, and this calling as a social responsibility, not just an opportunity for personal affirmation. This impetus nowadays does not live in good health, as almost anything that is honest and not only greed driven. Working is not necessarily an exercise of the ego, in this room it is a test.
Emanuele Marcuccio
December 3 – 21, 2024
Tuesday – Saturday, 11am – 6pm
Reception: December 3 from 6 – 8pm
