MAURO PERUCCHETTI

Mauro Perucchetti channels a minimal approach to painting through an intense yet controlled use of colour, brush and medium. Working in pigment, oil paint, and mixed media, Mauro challenges the fundamentals of painting, with luscious compositions of textural forms which seem to reconnect what is on the canvas to the textures of its origins on the painter's palette.

"Although not quite sculptures, the artworks are definitely three-dimensional paintings" says Mauro "this makes me think of how Enrico Castellani coined the beautifully simple description he gave to some of his work: SUPERFICI or Surfaces.  Painting is intrinsically related to my emotions and experiences and SUPERFICI is the result of uncountable scans of the surroundings that my senses record while being in nature. The beauty that manifest itself with textures, colours and scents in nature becomes abstract on canvas."

These are unchartered territories, which the viewer can explore at will and marvel at the fact that they never look the same twice.

Depending on the light washing the three-dimensional surfaces of the paintings the viewer can literally get lost in a sea of colours and in the shadows and highlights created by the topography of the organic textures.

All abstract, some more minimalist and some more abstract expressionist, all are what you make of them, but all carry a distinct signature which make it difficult not to recognize the artist's sensibility intrinsic to them.

MAURO PERUCCHETTI: NEO-POVERA

By Peter Frank

Arte Povera, the first artistic tendency to emerge wholly from Italy after World War II, constituted a powerful statement about rebirth, rebuilding, making solid what had been myth, making concrete what had been metaphor, and making reality out of what had been poetry. Exploiting base materials once foreign to the atelier, the artists of Arte Povera responded to art informel, nouveau réalisme, Pop Art, and kineticism with an art more lyrical and yet more abject than the aggressive late modernism of these imported styles could permit. Arte Povera helped lead the international avant garde out of Minimalism, but it remained a quintessentially Italian expression - which is why it helped bring Italy back toward the center of contemporary art a half century ago, and why it inspires Italian artists even today.

Working at some distance from his native land, Mauro Perucchetti has still allowed himself, mid-career, to fall under the spell of Arte Povera. Perhaps it is his very removal from Italy, from the soil that generated the gritty but dreamlike inventions of the Arte Povera artists, that has inspired Perucchetti to re-examine what was considered vanguard practice when he was a boy. In his current series he pays un apologetic homage to the spirit of the Povera movement, its reliance on attenuated symbolism and on materials found in mundane contexts - the streets, cheap shops, supermarkets, recycling bins, etc.

In Arte Povera's heyday, of course, there were no recycling bins. The ethos of that era, if anything, believedthatdiscardednewspapersandmealscouldperhapsberecycledasart (a nouveau réaliste gambit), but not as more meals (for, say, farm animals) and newspapers. Implied in Arte Povera's praxis was a nascent awareness of ecological imbalance. The scarcities of the War still haunted the generation of the1960s, to be sure, but in the midst of the economic boom there was a growing sense that the human race could be deprived once again of life's staples - simply because we were and are exhausting them, using them up without replenishment.

The mid-century critique of consumerism, passed by the nouveaux realists and Pop artists to their Arte Povera inheritors, did inflect Povera's understanding of the world as alchemical discourse. The movement's philosopher's stone, you could say, was environmental stability, inside as well as outside homo poeticus. Fifty years later, in an urgent era not of Earth Day celebrations but of melting ice caps, Perucchetti returns to the environmental theme, quite firmly and quite overtly. His art is already known for its fretful skepticism about our ability to replenish our garden and our troposphere (not to mention our intellects). It is a skepticism Perucchetti has here to fore conveyed with a cool, nasty brittleness manifested in mementos mori that taunt us with their glister, consumer bombs that scorch our spirit with their elegant disdain and bloodless despair. Here, however, warmed by the delicate romantic strain running through the original Arte Povera, Perucchetti's objects valorize the remains of the day with a charming and lustful, if still comparatively restrained, visual appetite, an appetite that translates from, but never quite leaves, the gustatory.

Following Arte Povera's lead by giving body to the metaphorical, Perucchetti presents us with the things we consume - literally, as with his spaghetti tableaux, and inferentially, as with the relief she composes from plastic packaging - and would have us re-consume them, the second time as art. Indeed, he proposes that we regard anything, from a gaudy piece of furniture to a planet, as artwork. But he also proposes that the re purposing of the universe not stop at making Duchampian Readymade designations. The packaging reliefs suggest arid architectural elevations, perhaps the first crude buildings of an off-planet colony or even of a non-planet settlement in a once-uninhabitable zone. He has turned plastic flowers into crumbling walls, bemoaning the destruction of human habitat through war and negligence - or, to read it a very different way, softening the sense of barrier so strongly conjured by the current xenophobic climate, but hardening the living organism. Elsewhere, faux poppies present themselves as ominous bonbons and a cube of nails begins to disintegrate - oblique but unmistakable references to the scourge of narcotics and to the strains in Islam that would erode the religion (embodied in the cubiform Kaaba) and turn its tenets into weapons.

At least for the moment, Mauro Perucchetti has put aside the frightening cheeriness and extravagantproductionvaluesofhispreviousworkinfavorofamorenuancedandtender critique. The memory of Arte Povera's salad days has clearly whetted his appetite for homemade pasta.  (Clearly he did not cook it al dente. But, curiously, he did seem to make it so that it looks like - well, like Italian late modernism, Fontana's pierced surfaces, Manzoni's achromes, Alviani's patterns, etc.) But every bite, every disentanglement of that hearty fare, slathered as it is in lush monochromes in place of marinara, is a multi-pronged comment on consumption. As Perucchetti warns we take it in today, we take more in tomorrow, and pretty soon we are running out not just of pasta, but of art…and worse.

Los Angeles, August 2016

UNICUM

Mauro Perucchetti

2013

SET IN STONE: MAURO PERUCCHETTI'S MODERN HEROES

By Peter Frank

Life is never so complex that acts of heroism, individual and societal, can't break through and set, or reset, standards of ethical thinking and moral behavior. But life can be complex enough to obscure what constitutes heroism. Who are the heroes, who are the false demigods, and who are the mad actors presuming themselves heroic but doing the devil's work? Describing heroic nobility is easier than identifying it - and identifying with it is easier than behaving according to its principles.

In his marble sculptures Mauro Perucchetti does not simply ponder these age-old questions, he invites, even seduces, us into contemplating them with him. He throws our false gods and anti-heroes back in our faces. He asks us whom we consider true heroes and whom mere idols. He challenges us - by carving marble, that most obdurate of traditional materials - to consider which heroes are real, and which are mere images, legends, myths.

Perucchetti's ancestors worshiped statues like this, setting a precedent that persisted almost until our time; and the fact that present-day objects of our devotion are overwhelmingly two- (and four-) dimensional does not rob the stone of its ability to compel, certainly not when Perucchetti's figures assume our dimensions as well as occupy our space. Indeed, the relative scarcity of sculpted bodies in contemporary art, especially in public space, gives an exotic flair to the realness of these marble apparitions - and, one could project, portends a new era of the solid.

Even now, three-dimensional imaging is rapidly bringing that era to fruition. But Perucchetti's work involves no such technology. He has repurposed a millennia-old method to modern artmaking, in order to give bite to its expression, a bite both ironic and prophetic, ethical and aesthetic. To hand-fashion marble in this day and age is to transcend anachronism and superannuation; rather, it is to invoke the very condition of idealism, pointing as it does at a model of reasoning and decorum so antiquated that it just might be new again.

At first glance, seeing Batman and Superman - ultra-post-modern versions of heroes - rendered in an ancient stone, and enacting hyperbolic, and homoerotic, gestures of salvation Michelangelo would recognize, seems a thorough capitulation to the lens of modern civilization. But snark actually loses here to passion. Such literalized, if frozen, drama vindicates rather than vitiates the innocent pretenses of cosplay participants, suggesting their imaginary heroes can take form in space as well as time, and in the most exquisite of materials. The more dubious heroics, and even more certain sexual frisson, that pairs Catwoman with Medusa asks us to consider both Perseus' nemesis and Batman's frenemy as complex personae, representing not fearsome evil but fear itself, the result of psyches damaged by trauma and injustice.

The duo of superhuman, yet compromised, women reveals a feminist subtext among Perucchetti's Modern Heroes, one that repositions the female with regard to her pedestal. She is no longer passive. She may make grave errors, as The Role Model does, but they are errors of commission; she is responsible for her actions and their victim, no longer the victim of men. Conversely, Perucchetti heroicizes woman by having her usurp man's pedestal, subjecting David to a Tiresian (not just surgical) conversion. The Tribute to Women assumes the original's dynamic poise, conflating the subject of heroic action with the object of desire. The unseen Goliath will be toppled, in a victory for women everywhere.

As we do, Perucchetti reads constantly of women fighting back all over the world. And he reads of men driven insane by their own circumstances, their medications, their fantasies. His version of Rodin's Thinker modifies the original only slightly, but drops it thereby into the maelstrom of contemporary angst. Perhaps Perucchetti is asking would-be murderers and suicides to contemplate their actions; or perhaps he's depicting (one of) them brooding over the impending, or even realized, deed. Whatever the narrative here, it is not that of the original's existential speculation - or, if it is, it is of such speculation endowed with deadly force, the ultimate anti-heroic act. We can perhaps bear anti-heroics of the type indulged in by the couple bathetically taking advantage of being Home Alone (Miss Piggy, no feminist she, is a hero mostly in her own mind); but The Thinker hits close to home.

The Sin of Man - and Woman - gets measured against a higher power, whether the Word of God or the connivances of gods. And of course, s/he is going to be found wanting; whether or not sin is original, it is eternal. Mauro Perucchetti ponders this metaphysical bind in his marble sculptures, employing a medium as timeworn as the stories of sin and redemption themselves. Maybe the most ironic thing about the series "Modern Heroes" is its title. Behind those costumes, those poses, that delicious and impervious material are beings that are neither heroes nor modern, just modernized. Ecce homo.

Los Angeles, June 2014

STONED AGAIN: NEW MARBLES BY MAURO PERUCCHETTI

By Peter Frank

It has been over the past few years that Mauro Perucchetti has fabricated this small but potent sequence of cultural references, a sequence that at once conflicts with and depends on the guidelines-or at least the tropes - of classic sculpture in marble. Having realized such an at-once elegant and parodic series, Perucchetti has recently turned his sights to the realization of more recondite sculptures. They are not harder to understand in their contemporary cultural contexts, to be sure, but they are harder to understand in the context of marble and its history. This slippage in context is precisely what gives them their edge, what hones, amplifies, and subverts their meanings to the point where we have to re-examine what they have meant in the first place, to us and to the civilization we sustain.

Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don't brings together four separate sculptural units on a fifth, a base whose blackness sets off the whiteness of the units placed thereupon. The white unit stake the shape of hands, hands in the act(s) of moving their fingers into crucial positions. The three reclining hands form their two most prominent fingers into the familiar "V" sign - a gesture first employed by Anglo-American forces during World War II as (literal) shorthand for "victory" and later adopted (perhaps ironically) by young people protesting the war in Vietnam (the sign again originating in the United States and adopted quickly by protestors around the world). Despite repeated attempts at co-optation by the very forces they oppose, anti-governmental protestors have retained the gesture. But their less political cohorts, at least in the United Kingdom, have further ironized the "V," converting it in to a rude gesture of defiance - to the point where it has become almost synonymous with the signal given by the one "standing" hand in Damned if You Do. That geste is the least beau of all, a one-digit salute whose sexual origins and resulting offensive meaning are globally recognized.

Perucchetti has left the elaborate hand speech of his native Italy, American Sign Language, and gansignaling for another day; he is more concerned here with digital semiotics gone viral. 18^th of October 1968, A Date I Still Remember - an unusual combination of marble and leather, and pointedly black on black - memorializes a moment of protest in which no "bird" was flipped, but might as well have been. Two African-American athletes, having won first and third places in an Olympic race in Mexico City, raised their fisted arms in a black-power salute, affronting their government with a show of separatism. Perucchetti has "translated" their gesture in to a yet clearer expression of rejection. 18^th of October contrasts significantly with Damned if You Do, beyond its reversal of color and expansion in size. While the larger sculpture commemorates a specific event that still resonates with Perucchetti - as it does for many others - almost a half-century since, the smaller reflects on a more general condition. 18^th of October would seem to celebrate the effectiveness of protest; despite the outcry and subsequent censure of the athletes who raised their fists (getting treated as if they had extended their middle fingers), the gesture retains its sway. But most protest, polite and impolite alike, is quashed by its targets, governmental and/or corporate, cut off at least at the wrist by a power elite that, especially these days, has no compunction about destroying, not just quieting, its popular (as well as official) opposition.

The other two new marble works are rather more forth right in their meaning, or at least their imagery. The Engraved Marble Dollar is just that, a replication so faithful to the paper original - right down to the green seal and grayed serial numbers - that only its absurdly large scale and heft keep its inventor out of prison for counterfeiting. This is no paper weight: It is a representation, in size and in density, of America's economic clout. Conversely, Fiato d' Artista proposes a circumstance that is, by inference, lighter than air. A marble replica of a "whoopee cushion," the Fiato renders the original gag physically impossible to realize, but in doing so reformulates it as a conceptual proposal - and, not accidentally, an elegant homage to Perucchetti's proto conceptual country man, Piero Manzoni, who sold balloons filled with "artist's breath" and cans of "artist's shit." Here, in a loving reversal of Manzoni's impermanent offerings, Mauro Perucchetti has given the least aspect of the human body - and a similarly coarse mimicking device - the dignity of permanence. Arse longa…

Los Angeles, January 2015

My painting is altogether instinctive. It does not speak to a definitive style or movement and is void of any subject matter, which might limit the free flow of my inner psyche and creative vision. The images I produce and there as on why I produce them are buried in the deeper layers of my mind and pertain more to the subconscious than to a conscious thinking process.

The paintings and the emotions they convey are automatic, constantly surprising to both artist and viewer. It is only once a painting is complete that  the true meaning forms and evolves, taking both myself and the viewer on a voyage of discovery.

The series title, Nuvole, 'Clouds' in Italian, befits the work with the spontaneity of looking at the sky and seeing images in the clouds, images that might look like a face to one and a skull to another. Much like clouds, the paintings evolve and transform to produce a whimsical world, where shapes, lines, colours and forms thrive in visual harmony.

Mauro Perucchetti 2018

A SENSE OF JOY

By Richard Cork

Now that the world is so beleaguered by conflicts, anxiety and untrustworthy political leaders, we feel immensely relieved to find in Mauro Perucchetti's new work an exuberant vision. Far from seeing our planet as a place over shadowed with gloom, he offers us an arresting alternative charged with vitality. His new paintings are sensual, humorous and above all celebratory. They seem to be powered by an inexhaustible energy, and their profusion of restless forms and colours have a spontaneity which directly reflects the artist's own spirit of delight.

When he began painting these canvases two years ago, Perucchetti must have experienced an enormous release. Although he gives his paintings the overall title Nuvole, as a tribute to his childhood fondness for staring up at clouds in the sky, Perucchetti regards his new work as essentially abstract. So it breaks away from his earlier preoccupation with pigmented resin sculpture, replacing it with painted forms darting all over the canvas surfaces. In this respect, they do evoke the dynamism of a sky where clouds never stop shifting, colliding, parting and changing their shapes very dramatically indeed.

John Constable was enthralled by such movement, declaring that the 'landscape painter who does not make his skies a very material part of his composition, neglects to avail himself of one of his greatest aids...It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment.' But Perucchetti insists that 'everyone sees different clouds, and I think of them as totally  abstract.' Nor does he share Constable's involvement with freely handled brush-marks which often make viewers aware of juicy pigment. Perucchetti starts his paintings with a pencil, because 'I want the lines to be precise, and the acrylic should achieve a super-smooth surface. No impasto. I use all the skills I have to make the paintings last, but I would also like them to have a child-like freshness.'

He has no desire to control the meanings conveyed by his art. These paintings emerge from his subconscious, and 'I only see creatures in my work after I have made them. The canvases have no titles, because I want people to make up their own minds when they look.' Hence the fascination we feel when viewing Perucchetti's paintings. Even when a particular form initially reminds us of a cloud, it suddenly resembles the ghost of an unidentifiable animal instead. At the opposite extreme, psychedelic flowers are evoked by another work, while elsewhere two luminous stars seem to be involved in performing an ecstatic dance.

Although our first impressions of a canvas may be chaotic, the longer we gaze the more it yields highly evocative possibilities. In one painting, which has more empty space than most of them, a flying pig with a parachute is discernible. But then we discover, in another painting, a dog wearing a gas-mask, and an even more ominous mood is created by the painting where a serpent wriggles a cross an Eden-like garden inhabited by a pregnant woman and a skull. Mouth can be found all over the place in Perucchetti's images, ranging from enormous and hungry to cheeky and gleeful. But the most frequent emotion conveyed by his work is a sense of joy, and this redemptive quality invites us to return to his paintings for the replenishment they abundantly provide.