Back in Black

BACK IN BLACK
Andrea Morucchio Solo Show
>>> Ca' Pesaro, International Gallery of Modern Art, Venezia, September 2 - November 6, 2011
Curated by Silvio Fuso

>>> Catalog with texts by Stefania Portinari, Giovanni Bianchi, Chiara Casarin, Daniele Capra, Gaia Conti, Domitilla Musella, Andrea Pagnes, Silvio Saura, Alberto Zanchetta.

Presented in September 2011 during the Venice Biennale, Back in Black stands as one of Andrea Morucchio’s most significant solo exhibitions. Hosted at Ca’ Pesaro – the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice – the show coincided with a major retrospective of Pier Paolo Calzolari, establishing a rare and compelling dialogue between contemporary visions.

Conceived as an anthological overview of the artist’s first decade of practice, BACK IN BLACK gathered sculptures, prints, and videos under a single unifying principle: the color black. More than a chromatic choice, black here acts as both material and metaphor—a conduit for exploring form, symbol, and meaning across sculpture, photography, installation, and performance.

As curator Stefania Portinari notes, quoting Saramago’s Blindness, “There always comes a moment when one has no option but to take a risk.” Morucchio, she writes, “is – to put it like AC/DC – Back in Black: back in his city with an anthological exhibition of sculptural works accompanied by a video representing a room of torture.” These “fetish-presences – ascetic and essential – move toward a ground zero of vision,” synthesizing the artist’s decade-long exploration of form in monochrome black.

After photography and journeys to places “where black is the brilliant background – deep and unknown” such as Cuba and Nepal, Morucchio returned to sculpture and installation, to what Portinari calls “an opaque and seductive black; polished; the almost medieval spirit of many of the works bordering on a menacingly defiant appearance and a fragility declared through the glaringly luminescent specificity of the medium – glass.”

The exhibition unfolds as a meditation on darkness as a space of resistance and revelation. The perfect definition of extreme forms and the precision of materials create, in Portinari’s words, “an ascetic and subversive dialogue, a dark monologue in which ascents and sacrifices are counterpart to a spirituality evoking cosmic and combative energy.”

This dialectic extends through key works such as Le Nostre Idee Vinceranno (2002), Laudes Regiae (2007), and B[æ]d Time, in which Morucchio confronts memory, anxiety, and violence through sculptural presence. Works like Cross Shoots and Celate explore fractured identity and spiritual protest, while Blade and Accumulo express the fragile tension between aggression and containment—the dual nature of glass as both weapon and wound.

As Portinari observes, black becomes here “the absence of color, pure signifying form, infernal color but also magical, generating protean chaos from which everything originates.” In this sense, Back in Black functions as an alchemical passage: a return to matter, to darkness, to the origins of form itself.

Morucchio’s “return to black” is not merely aesthetic but prophetic. Anticipating the turbulence of the coming decade—war, crisis, populism, ecological collapse, and media spectacle—the exhibition reveals an artist attuned to the shadowed dimensions of the contemporary. Today, its chromatic radicalism resonates with renewed urgency, calling us to confront the darkness of our time as both warning and possibility.

As Sol LeWitt wrote, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists, reaching conclusions that logic cannot grasp.” Perhaps, as Portinari suggests, this too applies to Morucchio: Back in Black stands as both heretical self-portrait and chivalric quest, a mystic return to the zero degree of vision—where from darkness, new forms of light may still emerge.