Emerging

Emerging - Revisiting Canova plaster sculptures 

Morucchio photographed the Canova plaster models in 1994, captivated by their beauty and by the embedded reference points appearing as black dot grids on the skin.

Emerging was born from a series of black and white photographs of Canova's plaster busts, taken by Morucchio in '94 at the Gipsoteca di Possagno, near Venice. The artist focuses his attention on the map of coding points imprinted on the plaster, reference points and codes of an ideal of beauty, which were used by the neoclassical artist to control the transformation of the work from preparatory plaster to Carrara marble.

And so, through the photographic medium, the artist searches for his personal ideal of beauty; he dissects Canova's bodies, mutilates them, isolates a part, subtracting it from multiplicity, focusing on the bust, which thus becomes an element full of meaning, as the seat par excellence of emotions, of the pulse of life.

And, not surprisingly, through digital reworking, he turns the images in red, a highly symbolic color, synonymous with pain and suffering, alarm and transgression, but also with passion and femininity. Color is, according to Kandinsky, "a means of exerting a direct influence on the soul" and here, in its materiality, it is metaphorically revealed among the muscle bands of those robust and strong torsos, healthy bearers of a captivating and intense sensual charge.

This series of digital works was created in synergy with the Offshots sculpture series for the two solo exhibitions in 2006, Emerging Code in Berlin and Hobart.

For other exhibition occasions Morucchio has elaborated a couple of the same Canovian subjects in different colors, for the solo exhibition Back in Black and group show Silent Movies in grayscale.