“Disco Moon”, critic text by Claudia Amato & Alberto Zanchetta, 2009, eng

Andrea Morucchio’s "Disco Moon" stems from this revisitation of the famous micro-sculpture: nineteen circular elements – made of cardboard, wood, and photographic prints – reproduce just as many moons. The artist has set these archetypal and primordial forms into silver discs and scattered them on the ground, granting them a radial movement, like orbitting spheres imitating the motion of heavenly bodies. Through these luminous limbos, it becomes possible to see a reflection of both the sky and the istoriato façade of the adjacent Temple of San Lorenzo - an optic effect which implicates astrology and religion.

As the artist explains, the title of the installation intends to create “iconoraphic short-circuits between Catholic and pagan symbols, by the consequent return to origins of religious sentiment, and also, by the observation of space, the stars, and their influence”. Inevitably, the viewer’s thoughts leap to the great philosophers of the past - to Plato (who saw in the circle the perfect form, later adopted as the medieval symbol of the absolute). Likewise, the magic circles of neo-pagan rituals aimed at creating an imaginary space able to separate, if only ideally, the material world from the supernatural one.

Form without a beginning or an end, a life cycle which repeats infinitely and returns in the famous squaring of the circle - symbol of the dualistic desire to bring the celestial and terrestrial spheres back in concordance… But if in astrology and the ocult sciences man is unconsciously introduced to his own destiny, in Morucchio’s work it is man himself (as a pasing element) who controls the unfolding of events. The viewer’s attention thus shifts from the hypnotic, multi-coloured moons to the surrounding envrionment, which becomes an integral and reverse part of the installation.

The gaze seizes the lunar circles, while the mind registers and inverts them along the perpendicular axis of the rose window in a finite/infinite game, [de]materializing the cyclical nature of the natural process and the repeating of the phenomena which subtend to the laws of the universe. And finally, the stress falls on the absence of ruptures and on the spatial-temporal indissolubility, or rather, on an intrinsic circularity of atavistic symbols and cultural legacies, almost like a temenos that induces the passer-by into awe, inhibiting him or her from crossing it.