ENZO CUCCHI

BIOGRAPHY

Enzo Cucchi was born in 1949 in Morro d'Alba, a farming village in the province of Ancona in central Italy. As an autodidactic painter Cucchi was lauded in his early years even though he was more interested in poetry. He frequently visited poet Mino De Angelis, who was in charge of the magazine Tau. Through La Nuova Foglio di Macerata, a small publishing house, he met with art critic Achille Bonito Oliva, an important figure in the artist's prospective career. In its catalogues La Nuova Foglio di Macerata published writings of artists such as Cucchi's Il veleno è stato sollevato e trasportato! in 1976. Frequent trips to Rome in the mid-seventies revived Cucchi's interest in visual arts. He moved to Rome, temporarily abandoned poetry and dedicated himself exclusively to the visual arts. Here Cucchi met with different artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino and Nicola de Maria with whom he began to work in close contact and to establish dialectical and intellectual dialogues.
Achille Bonito Oliva was the first to name this young generation of Italian artists of the seventies as a group: In Flash Art Magazine, no. 92-93, 1979, he used the term Transavanguardia for the first time. The official proclamation of the Transavanguardia took place at the 1980 Venice Biennal. The term was an idiom for the art of this young generation following the Avant-garde art of the sixties. These artists no longer sought to evoke discomfort in the spectator by all means and to force him to go beyond the work to grasp it fully.
The members of the Transavanguardia-group have diverse working methods. Their identity as a group is not dependent on rules or any binding language of expression, but they share a preference for motifs gathered from imaginable reality and the free use of past and present. Cucchi uses forms suggestive of the landscape, legends and traditions of his home-region. He shows nature, history and culture in a playful relationship with our technical world, using symbols like a train or an ocean-liner and employing colour in terms of idea, expansion and motion rather than for pictorial sensation. His artwork is often accompanied by poetic texts some of which have been published.
Aside from the numerous Transavanguardia- group-exhibitions, his work has been the subject of solo shows in galleries, museums and cultural sites all over the world.

THE TRANSAVANTGARDE
By
Achille Bonito Oliva

1980 - Manifesto

To do art means henceforth to control the levels of the cortical matter of art. After the self-flagellation of these last years, the artist has rediscovered his own specific role as well as the pleasure to exercise creative activity without obligation to invent something new.
To requalify the role of art means for the artist to reconquer its own territory, to transfer its own practice within specific frontiers of an operation that does not measure itself against the world, against its own history and against the history of its own expressions. The artist of this generation rediscovers the privilege of enclosure in the sense of reserve, concentration, and focus point of a biology of art. Behind this experience broods a great humility that consists in beginning anew from the narrow and laborious territory of a manual production, not limiting itself to thinking or indicating but devoted to a uniting, to visible facticity--as it appears in the terminal of the work--and to a mental index. The mentality that licensed techniques and materials is being replaced by a mentality licensing the tangibility of a product. The missing pride of the conceptual artist's work, the elitist behavior of the artist who was playing on the amazement of the public and on the element of surprise, are being replaced by the humility of creative, accessible, and real work.
Art becomes again direct expression, leaving behind it the feeling of guilt for being permanent, which was a symptom of contact with the world. The artist becomes again maniacal and Mannerist in his own mania.
The opposition moved toward the perspective of a possible reconciliation with the world. The dialectic was the symptom of an ideology that thought it could continue using its old tricks in the face of a henceforth impregnable reality. The young artists have ceased to practice such tricks because there is no longer any direction toward which they can steer the creative experience . . .
The Transavantgarde is born precisely from this condition, unfolding like a fan, open not only toward a mythical future but also toward the renewal of a minor past, namely, a past removed from the rhetoric of the great traditions. This "minority" is one more value that is recovered by the new art mentality, which moves with feminine gestures and with a feminine and subterranean sensitivity.
Transavantgarde artists who practice this other-than-art feeling belong to this generation and are part of a great creative expansion.