Emerging Code | Hobart

EMERGING CODE (A)

March 10 - April 8, 2006

Despard Gallery, Hobart

solo show

catalogue with texts by Noel Frankham + Marco Baravalle

EMERGING CODE originates from the dialogue between sculpture and photography. The project intertwines two interconnected series: OFFSHOOTS, a sculptural body of work, and EMERGING, a series of digitally reworked photographic prints.

Conceived in 2006, the exhibition finds its roots in a photographic project realized in 1994 for the Gipsoteca di Possagno, dedicated to Antonio Canova. A long reflection on Canova’s oeuvre—particularly his plaster models—led Morucchio toward an aniconic, abstract reinterpretation of Neoclassical ideals.

In EMERGING CODE, the artist presents sculptures from the OFFSHOOTS series—compositions of forged and perforated iron sheets whose openings are filled with semi-transparent, sandblasted red-orange glass elements—alongside photographic works from the EMERGING series. These photographs, digitally manipulated and printed on reflective silver film, abstractly reimagine Canova’s plaster figures, creating a dialogue between the tangible and the ethereal, matter and light.

The exhibition functions as an immersive installation: the visitor moves through an environment shaped by aesthetic and conceptual resonances between sculpture and image. The red glow of the glass elements and the reflective silver surfaces of the photographs generate a pulsating visual rhythm—an atmosphere both meditative and dynamic.

Morucchio interprets the glass tiles as three-dimensional transfigurations of Canova’s points de repère—the small bronze markers that “encoded” Classical beauty and guided the translation of plaster models into marble. In Offshoots, these reference points become luminous modules: square glass tiles in shades of red and orange, each with a softly rounded central relief. These elements form the structural and conceptual foundation of the sculptures, embodying both geometric rigor and expressive vitality.

I consider the glass elements as a three-dimensional transfiguration of the small bronze points on Canova’s sculptures,” says Morucchio. “The points, which codified Classical beauty, served to reproduce in marble the proportions of the original plaster model. I see these sculptural works, in combination with the digitally enhanced photographs of the human figure, as an abstract transposition of figurative Neoclassical beauty—an exercise in reducing its expressive language to a minimal, essential code.

Through this synthesis of iron, glass, and digital image, EMERGING CODE becomes an investigation into the transformation of beauty: from Classical ideal to contemporary abstraction, from the coded perfection of form to the luminous pulse of matter.

Presented alongside the main installation, a selection of original analog black-and-white prints from the GIPSOTECA series (1994) offers a complementary, documentary perspective on the aesthetic and conceptual origins of EMERGING CODE. Shot on 6×7 negatives at the Gipsoteca Canoviana in Possagno, these photographs capture the tactile and spiritual presence of Canova’s plaster models, illuminating the visual and emotional matrix from which Morucchio’s later explorations emerged.

Significantly, the EMERGING works also mark Morucchio’s first exploration of digital art, a pivotal transition from analog photography to digital manipulation. Although grounded in negatives shot decades earlier, these works translate the artist’s analog origins into a new visual language—one that fuses material precision with digital abstraction, bridging centuries of artistic evolution.

As Marco Baravalle observes in his critic text SAMPLING CANOVA for exhibition catalogue, EMERGING CODE can be read both as a reflection on Canova’s passage from material to thought—a process of abstraction echoed in Morucchio’s dialogue between plaster, iron, and glass—and as an example of contemporary postproduction art, where the artist reconfigures pre-existing materials to generate new meaning. Morucchio’s approach balances critical reinterpretation and formal continuity, bridging the legacy of Canova and Lucio Fontana through a sculptural language that opens luminous, living spaces within matter itself.