“DEBRIS”
Text by Marco Antonini
Written on the occasion of the solo show at super bien! Berlin. Berlin 2026
Davide Zucco’s DEBRIS series occupies a singular position within his practice, at once departing from and deepening a set of concerns that have long animated his work. If earlier pieces often seemed to emerge from a temporal and symbolic field suggestive of archaic memory—surfaces recalling geological strata, signs suspended between hieroglyph, rune, vegetal growth, and animal trace—DEBRIS shifts that same sensibility inward, toward the studio itself as a site of accumulation, retention, and return.
Here, memory does not operate as image alone, nor as iconographic allusion, but as material fact. The works are composed entirely of residual matter: cast-offs, fragments, overflows, and discarded elements generated through Zucco’s own studio processes. What would elsewhere remain peripheral to the work appears as its central condition. Chrome-like surfaces, scratched paint, foam bubbles, resin spills, plexiglass, cardboard, and plywood coexist, held together by accretion as much as composition. Their chromatic register moves from stark, chalky whites to raw wood tones and sanguine reds, where matter oscillates between relic, wound, and architectural ruin.
In this sense, the works also begin to resonate with a more recent line of thought within Zucco’s practice: the figure of the gardener as a way of conceiving care, cultivation, and reciprocity with matter. Over time, accumulation here ceases to read as mere residue and instead acquires the logic of a tended surface, one in which deposits, debris, and material persistence suggest a non-linear temporality closer to growth than to chronology. Matter is not simply left behind; it is retained, reabsorbed, and transformed. What emerges is a form of memory that behaves less like archive than compost—layered, living, and continuously reactivated.
Displayed horizontally, the pieces resist the frontal logic of the image while equally refusing the autonomy and assertiveness of elevated sculpture. They present themselves as repositories, deposits, or transient states in visible form: scratches, fractures, excesses, and imprecisions through which memory becomes legible. Seen through glass, within a light-filled structure allowing multiple points of view, they appear suspended between display and preservation.
The glass house itself becomes more than a neutral container. Its architecture quietly amplifies the internal logic of the work, evoking a space of cultivation, exposure, and slow transformation. In this setting, the material deposits of the studio find resonance with the spatial language of growth, as if the works themselves were being held within an environment of incubation. The tension between the dense tactility of their relatively diminutive surfaces and the near-dematerialized transparency of the architecture intensifies the viewer’s need to breach the distance between eye and work.
At closer inspection, each work seems to retain the ghost of previous gestures, of other objects once underway, of forms abandoned yet not entirely lost: a sedimentation field carrying within it the latent memory of prior decisions, pressures, and failures. If there is an ecology at work, it remains implicit: not a programmatic statement, but a quiet insistence that nothing is ever entirely discarded, that matter and memory persist through transformation, circulation, and return.