Fragments, pieces, layers, bits of images that get mixed up only to come back together again in the altered identity of a figure that is “other”, that evokes the original, confirms it, but reintreprets it at the same time.
In his recent works, Andrea Morucchio is looking for a point of contact, an encounter with the great painting of the Renaissance and Baroque in order to verify the existence of a relationship with art of the past. But a search for something new cannot and must not go against tradition; if anything it has to provide different keys of interpretation in order to see it again, to bring it back to the contemporary.
This is an objective that Morucchio already dealt with in the 2015 installation: “The Rape of Venice”, in the rooms of Palazzo Mocenigo during the 56th Venice Biennale. Instead, here on this ocassion the artist has created a carpet made up of fragments of mosaic flooring from Saint Mark’s Cathedral and he has recreated it in a sort of a visual puzzle which invokes themes of the labyrinth.
In this “decomposition” and in the different recomposition of the geometric pattern of the flooring of Saint Mark’s, Morucchio locates a state of precarious balance and confirms the innate tendency of the artist to produce order through the continuous research of simple forms, which is the primary function of Abstractionism. This is almost a metaphor for the human dynamic, for a new visual perception of reality.
The “iconic” images from Renaissance painting, that are individuated by Morucchio, are then re-elaborated in a process of chromatic fragmentation which declares its identity; they become decomposed visions and they are restituted in fragile chipped elements, like pieces of memory that return after a deleterious explosion. The time and space of this restitution comes about all within the modern concept of the pixel, a elaboration tool of the sensitive data of the images. But the characteristics that govern this singular ars combinatoria are generated by the personal poetics of the artist who is able to fuse different concepts and arrange them into solutions and models of a rare aesthetic refinement.
Morucchio works on sensorial fragments which suggest the extinction of any type of closed form and suggest unusual trajectories, iconic warping and a type of thinking in which it is possible to lose oneself in citations and references. The painting is a deforming mirror which dislocates vision, modifies proportions and the asychronous nature of perception until there is a glimpse of a possibility of a surface which reflects the past and projects it onto the immediate future.
The references go from Leonardo to Botticelli, from Giorgione to Titian which all enter into the halls of suggestions with an ideological slant, with the stereotype of already worn-out images of aesthetic consumerism, and thereby easily interpretatable by the larger public. Morucchio’s distinction lies is his ability to bring these references into a different type of interpretative philosophy which interrupts the temporal circle to open up towards the ever wider territories of modern language.