Weekend Reviews: Enzo Cucchi at Vito Schnabel

Vito Schnabel is the proud venue exhibiting the first major New York show of Enzo Cucchi (Italian, b. 1949) in over 20 years (the last time his work was shown in the city was a solo exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1986). Cucchi is one of the original members of Transvanguardia, the Italian equivalent of Neo-Expressionism in the 1980s whose members included Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia. Mostra Coagula was curated solely by Cucchi himself, a striking similarity to how his 1986 Guggenheim exhibition was carried out. The exhibition's Italian title translates into English along the lines of "Coagulated Show" or "Show Coagulates", an apt choice considering blood - the liquid most commonly associated with coagulating - is a recurring motif. Recent paintings, ceramics, and marble sculptures are on view as part of Cucchi's probing into the highly complex terrain of human emotions. These surrealistic works are rich with European art historical references that have been inflected with a contemporary flair. Take the human skull as one example, a time-honored subject that was especially relevant in Renaissance & Baroque art as a symbol of memento mori, the transience of life and the harsh truth that death comes to all. For Cucchi, skulls appear in painted and sculptural iterations, sometimes together as one of his Untitled works on canvas features three painted skulls floating inside golden orbs whilst seven miniature ceramic skulls are attached to the lower right of the canvas - it is death within the artwork, but also spilling out into the physical space in which we, the viewers, stand.

Though skulls appear frequently in this exhibition, other works go into far more convoluted directions that feel as though one were receiving a visualization of an uncomfortably passive dream or an opaquely ominous nightmare (particularly one in which you sense something is amiss, but are unable to identify what that could be). Sculptures of putti, winged cherubs that appear in much religious art of the Old Masters, have been tainted by the specter of death as their faces turn skeletal and bodies convulse in abject pain. But then in the more subtle works, there are instances in which a red house or barn is the locus with the presence of ghostly cat-like creatures surrounding the structure or elsewhere a faceless darkened figure with eyes over its chest is situated along a white wall in an indiscernible room. Cucchi's exploration of human emotions, or perhaps, the subconscious, raises more questions than answers, but it effectively considers the gamut of the ugly side of where one's emotions can lead.