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Enzo Cucchi


ENZO CUCCHI

The Portrait of a Painter

still from the film ENZO CUCCHIThe film's structure follows the logic of the European alphabet. The logic of the visual resemblance between signs and forms. This structure is accompanied by the music of Andrea Ceccomori and Antonio Cocomazzi "Beyond - The Crossing Flute".

Long, slender hands, paintbrush-hands, words in disarray and disordered thoughts, Art which leans towards chaos. What is the key to understanding Enzo Cucchi?


Considered the most visionary among the Transavanguardia artists, by the 1980s, Enzo Cucchi had become an internationally renowned artist. He moved to Rome in the 1970s and momentarily abandoned poetry, dedicating himself almost exclusively to the visual arts. There Cucchi came into contact with artists like Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, with whom he established dialectical and intellectual dialogues.


To Cucchi, painting was a means of associating forms, concepts, and materials. He utilized the invasive expression of gesture, through which the canvas was transformed into a magical territory dense with images and thoughts, vehicles for a discourse fractured into a thousand suspended elements. He layered disparate symbols from classic or dreamlike matrices, ripped from reality or memory, setting in motion their interaction on the chromatic fabric from which they seemed at the same time to emerge. The loss of emporal-spatial coordinates and the continuous incursion into territories of culture and emotion coincided with Cucchi's undisciplined use of color - thick then smooth, violent then delicate - and he experimented widely with different artistic techniques, from painting to ceramics and mosaics.

The artist's interest in the interaction between the arts and other disciplines led him to participate in diverse spheres (from the visual arts to architecture, design, and fashion), and to harvest the importance and ingenuity of each encounter. This prompted collaborations with Ettore Sottsass and the Galleria Memphis, Rome (today Galleria Roberto Giustini) on editorial projects (Idisuguali, a project by Cucchi and Sottsass of the periodical edition of ceramic panels) as well as collaborative works with other artists and shared exhibitions.




The film on Enzo Cucchi is the result of seven years of observation.


ITALY, 24', DV Cam, colour
Production: Brintrup Filmproduktion/ LICHTSPIEL ENTERTAINMENT

CAST Enzo Cuccchi, Ettore Sottsass, Mimmo Paladino, Georg Baselitz, Rebecca Horn, Johanna Grawunder, Jannis Kounellis u.a.
MUSIC Beyond - The Crossing Flute
MUSICIANS Andrea Ceccomori, Antonio Cocomazzi, Francesco Santucci, Giovanni Seneca, Roberto Costa, Giovanna Famulari, Fabio Battistelli, Roberto Belelli, Francesco Sardella, DJ Knuf
CAMERA / SOUND Jorge Alvis, Benny Hasenclever
AUDIO MIX Francesco Sardella
LOCATION MANAGER Peter Naguschewski
PRODUCTION MANAGER Aloys Silva
WRITTEN / EDITED / DIRECTED BY Georg Brintrup
PRODUCTION Brintrup-Film, Rom; Lichtspiel Entertainment GmbH
WORLD PREMIÈRE Palladium in Rome on September 28th 2007
FESTIVALS Artecinema in Naples 2007
Artfilmfestival in Asolo 2008
Festival Internazionale di Film sull'Arte Contemporanea in Brixen 2008
gallery with stills from the film