Emerging Code | Hobart

Emerging Code (A)

March 10 - April 8, 2006 | sculpture/digital art | Despard Gallery, Hobart

Texts in catalogue by Noel Frankham, Marco Baravalle

Andrea Morucchio's solo show Emerging Code interpreted Antonio Canova at Despard Gallery, Hobart, Australia. This major solo exhibition project incorporated the Offshots sculpture series, made of forged and pierced iron sheets with the openings filled with semi-transparent red satin glass elements, the silver prints from the Emerging series reproducing Antonio Canova’s neo classical plaster figurative sculptures and a selection of  bw analogic photographic prints, Gipsoteca series, of the same Canova's sculptures shoot by Morucchio in 1994 at the Canova Plaster Museum in Possagno.

I consider the glass elements as a three-dimensional transfiguration of the small bronze points on Canova’s sculptures; the points, which “codify” Classical beauty, were used by Canova to reproduce in marble the proportions and sizes of the original plaster model.

I see these plastic works, in combination with the enhanced human figure photos, as an abstract transposition of figurative Neo-Classical beauty. An abstract, minimal and rough expression of a code that discloses a deeper beauty; an exercise in reducing the Neo-Classical figurative sculptures to minimal expressive terms.