Thursday, June 18, 2009

A Painting of Precious Fires


Large scale, intense paintings...the works of Enzo Cucchi are what pulled me into art making...I saw a piece entitled, "The Houses go Downhill" which changed the way I saw painting...it was a vast landscape on fire, turned slightly up, like a Cezanne table, with two precariously set long rectangular homes, teetering and looking to fall in a wedge shape...and behind it, a small wagon, lost in the pulsing landscape...as if their prosperity had vanished in a burst of flames...

The piece above has that same kind of painterly intensity...I can also appreciate the decorative quality of the fire plumes in a spiral...Cucchi is a painter and is not shy about the application of paint...the material is in harmony with the form it represents...flowing in the objects direction and describing accurately the sensation of the moment...this piece also visually has that heat, with a strong contrast between the black background going off into space infinitely and the whitest, hot flame of the plumes...the twin figure's role in the piece is uncertain...they seem to be part of the flames, but they could also be at war, battling and absorbing the precious fires...

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