Text by Alfredo Sigolo
Written on the occasion of the solo show at Luis Adelantado. Valencia 2011

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In his first solo exhibition in Spain Davide Zucco (Belluno, Italy 1981) presents a clearly characterised project, which is a declaration of intent of his vision of the world.

All the works presented are developed on a paper base, a choice which recalls the idea of writing through images that do not aim at solving didactic or didascalic functions but rather demonstrating a thesis in an inductive way (from the particular to the universal).

In the background we have the experience and recognition of a reality still dominated by the laws of Nature, which oppose the exasperated anthropocentrism of modernity, and prevarication of humanity over the animal and vegetal life which surrounds it. To this, Zucco opposes a perspective which trascends the contingency of a panicked vision of the world and history, characterised by transformations induced by the animating energy within all things, and regulated by Nature's cyclic essence.

The irradiant and hypnotic subjects of the paintings are archetypical shapes that rise to symbols ascribable to a collective subconscious; the bright chromatisms that shape them represent the energy that feeds life. In the title, “Burning colors” refers to these dynamics where fire, which at once consumes and regenerates, is the element of life and death, light and shade.

Zucco works on the definition of a sort of cosmology which embodies the dialectic of opposites, their fatal coexistence, and reciprocal dependence, in the name of a deterministic monism which opposes dualist conflict. So the transformation of blood from red to black, as we have in the title, projects the earthly perspective to the universal, where black recalls the matter of outer space.

In the works exhibited, eyes are a recurrent element which fulfil a role of connection and structural balance between object. They are synapses which connect the image's fibres, and upturn the relationship between observer and observed object. The spectator is, in turn, actor; and the observed work becomes observing subject of the world outside itself, almost as if placed in a dimension parallel to the visible.

Such conceptual dynamics find coherence in the processual aspects of technique, which becomes physical as well as intellectual exercise; the use of oil paint prevails, contamined by mixed techniques but carried out with the discipline of a miniaturist, spaced and cadenced by the obsessive repetiotion of pre-ordered modules. The methodical attention to detail induces a perspective double reading of the paintings, microscopic and macroscopic, suggesting a parallel with biologic organisms, composed by alementary structures, atoms, cells, molecules.

In conclusion, it is obvious that defining Zucco's work figure painting would be inappropriate, his work is a formal synthesis that aims at an abstraction of reality which reveals deep and hidden aspects, invisible to the eye and irreducible to the shape and representation of real data.