“Beyond the Face. The contemporary portrait” text by Laura Cornejo Brugés, 2020, ENG

Within the multidisciplinary and experimental artistic research that distinguishes Andrea Morucchio’s professional career, the idea of beauty in a given space-time context represents one of the cores of his aesthetic investigations. However, this idea is cultivated with a genuine creative purpose: to conceive of art as the last stronghold where it is possible to exercise social and cultural criticism today, or free expression in a society made distrustful by the prevailing disinformation. 

With such a humanistic sense of the work, the “Puzzling Pop” project acquires a broad semantic coherence, innovating the legacy of Pop Art, a movement pioneering in denouncing the alienation of the homologated and standardized communication systems of consumer society. Using citation and revisionist strategies, Morucchio operates on Andy Warhol’s famous portraits of media icons, using a digital collage technique - the juxtaposition of photographic fragments of butterfly wings - with which he deconstructs the morphology of the faces. The subjects are given a new visual texture, due to the chromatic alterations and expressive traces of a puzzle that renews their sense of individuality.

Morucchio, interested in both the retinal image and its symbolic lexicon, re-proposes the ontology of the portrait in its constant mutation and dissimilarity that does not allow any cultural or historical image to be fixed with absolute precision, where the potential of “being in its uniqueness” resides in alterity and versatility.