BEPPO ZUCCHERI Documenting constant thoughts by images

BEPPO ZUCCHERI
Documenting constant thoughts by images

There are moments in which we ask ourselves what there's inside a painting that deeply moves us, works on us, acting on our feelings by recalling almost private thoughts, images stirred in a far corner of our minds, lived moments sometimes buried by our daily routine. It is more and more unusual, but still somehow possible.
Works of such a kind fix in our memory as they directly tell something to the onlooker as if it were a whisper to the ear, something completely private. But if this happens to every single observer in front of the same work, this means that inside of it there are universal laws, translated into images, that each one of us sets within its own self, in its own way. Nudes, landscapes, corners of the world, figures in the shade are actors of an everlasting drama which every time takes on new and subjective features. His works have got such a strength and even something more.
Beppo Zuccheri is an artist who puts himself at stake even though painting is not a game for him. It's an obsession rather than a passion, he can't help it, he says, even though we prefer realizing it is painting that can't do without him. When he sets about painting, preparing, assembling, building Beppo Zuccheri places himself at the disposal of something that's about to be created. He lets it come to life without indulging on the naturalness of the event. This is why we perceive it so familiar. He divests himself of any artful conceptual trick in order to make fearless art. He doesn't fear judgment, he doesn't hide behind commercial themes, incomprehensible and thus non-judicable subjects, he doesn't even conceal his thought with comfortable ones.
On the contrary.
His paintings are scene paintings within which complex, articulate, and meaningful subjects detach for their own elegance or cruelty, without any intercession. He carefully choses the actors of the performance, being them relicts or gorgeous nudes, in order to face magniloquent themes, stories that have marked the culture of humanity.
His work is emotional hypothesis, a place in which it is actually possible to recognize our own history or the history that has been handed on from classical tradition. It represents moments of everyone's life, they're either real or mythological that visually come up to our present time, to the moment in which we look through them. Their history, their ruins look into our eyes. They carry on them the evidence of what has been and of what Beppo wants to tell us.
Emptiness screams, too. What is not on the surface, the unsaid, the non-showed, the censured makes as much sense as the rest. As, at the end, history exists only if it is properly told in all its ravines. They can be either shining or dark and, in such works, stories deeply interpreted by the artist come back to life. Illegible handwritings, as too fast or erased, become hints to ancient scripts that are misinterpreted, present hieroglyphics referring to communicational impossibility, to frictions among different languages. It is a bitter acknowledgment, a declaration of the kind of awareness belonging to who has lived history throughout the centuries. Ascending stairs that don't smash in, real objects disclosing the surface bi- dimensionality, eyes covered with bandages as visual silences. Zuccheri takes away. He takes off clothes, he takes away freedom to his subjects by tying them up, he removes explaining details, he hides parts of the tale behind drapes, he deletes, he deprives all the objects of their original function, so that they lie embalmed on his works. And it's the emptiness itself that calls us out not only to look at but also to listen to. Watching is enough, even if we're impelled to touch, to come closer, to smell, to graze....we stand where the painting demands us to stand, in the exact point from which it can observe us. Zuccheri's works ask us precise questions, they are able to raise exact matters, they sometimes make us irrefutably answer.
Compositions, pieces of reality that are handled, reused, assembled and rearranged in order to take on new meanings and new functions. Nuts and bolts become jewels, ropes become stairways to heaven, wood pieces become curtains. The one who considers this Poor Art is wrong in this case. The one who believes it to spring from ready made is wrong. It is rather a congregation of conscious objects meeting up to give rise to a demonstration about the concepts of movement by relating the space of the canvas to the time they come from and it successfully communicates. The presence of such actual objects takes the painting closer to the installation, to the effective multidimensionality of art where the chaotic assemblage is able to convey a perfect order, both structural and readable. … It seems as if the whole visible becomes functional. Each object can take on a new life, each piece of matter can overwork its own feature to become useful in another way. Other artists' work is for him a means of work: if in his canvas we can identify similarities, recollections to the artistic production of some great Twentieth Century painters, is not because there are influences or inspirations, not even quotes or tributes. Some works are treated by Zuccheri in a way they can remind us about others only because such way is functional: a subject seen in a certain way or a substance used in another are parts of the toolbox, they are useful like colors and broad knife, they are also part of an absolutely unique alphabet that doesn't make use of already spoken words.
Each of his products is never finished, it is constantly re-handled, it is a meeting point between the philosophical themes' magniloquence of mythological subjects and the raw presence of rough matter. Myth and scrap. Two different ends of the same tension which, nevertheless, can meet on the same surface, can speak the same language, can combine, can melt, merge, mingle in order to generate a new visual reality. They both have the same weight, the same importance, they feed one another to take the onlooker's gaze among the folds of the details and the gateway of perspective.
From theme to technique. Everything leads to a steady unity of thoughts. It is as if it would be possible to assume a fractal system of ideas more than of shape: what is said lives in the detail and in the whole at the same time, with the same dignity, the same divinity. This is possible because behind everything there is a comprehensive elaboration, not only a temporary meditation on the processing subject: the smallest gesture is eloquent as much as the whole painting and as much as his complete production of the last years