ARTISSIMA 2022

On the occasion of the 2022 edition of Artissima, Frittelli arte contemporanea returns to exhibit with a project dedicated to Lucia Marcucci, entitled The Power of Images.

The exhibition brings into dialogue the artist's early collages (1960-1970), an ironic and provocative reinterpretation of social and political issues of the time, with more recent works (2000-2010) that propose an analysis of the codes of advertising in our time.

"My poetics consists, through word and sign, in the literary and pictorial, but above all critical reworking of mass media (images, slogans, variously persuasive and mystifying languages of the contemporary social system)."

Aware of the constant mutation of language and its ambiguity, Marcucci draws on the words and images of the world of mass communication to compose irreverent and unscrupulous visual poems, where exclamations taken from comic book baloons often appear. The political character of her work – her denounce against gender discrimination, imperialisms, militarism, land exploitation, the power of information, and idolatry toward new technologies- is the common thread that connects the collages of the 1960s and 1970s and the works of the 2000s made on the large canvases typical of urban advertisements: beyond the subjects, which vary with the passage of time, there is no caesura between these two phases of her work. Indeed, the artist's aim always remains to redeem images through a new pedagogy of the gaze.

The works in the most recent cycle Città larga [Wide City] are made by tampering with a type of street advertising that was widespread and pervasive in the city at the beginning of the millennium: fabric banners hung on street lighting poles. A hallmark of the urban periphery, these advertising messages carry images conceived according to popular logics that never deviate from established clichés. Reacting to the "totality of the image" means playing with and against the mass media, using this new language to deflect and unveil its reach, producing alternative practices that reaffirm the right to the enjoyment of all spaces of social life. 

Art for Marcucci is thus confirmed as a critique of the limits of dominant culture.