Circostanza Eroica (Heroic Situation)

In Enzo Cucchi’s Circostanza Eroica (Heroic Situation), the Italian artist conjures a dramatic vision of a beast, both inherently familiar and fantastically strange. Cucchi decapitates the head of the animal, so that its form is spread across two separate canvases. With a dull, earthy palette, the wounded creature is roughly modelled with sweeping, expressionistic brushstrokes, and is possessed with an inaccurate and ambiguous anatomy that appears uncanny and unfamiliar. Circostanza Eroica (Heroic Situation) excellently demonstrates Cucchi’s engagement with a gestural painterly style, whilst thematically evoking a primitive and visionary imagery. A member of the Transavantgarde, an Italian group of neoexpressionists, Cucchi’s work visually complements the group’s intention to reinstate emotive figuration within painting. Commenting on the narrative and thematic aspects of Cucchi’s work, Diane Waldman has assessed that ‘Cucchi is the painter as seer, both demon and saint, possessor and possessed, he is at once the creator and subject of his tale. He is the painter as mad visionary, participant in and witness to the nether world from which one can emerge after a ritual of fire and purification, to the realm of the sublime’ (D. Waldman, Enzo Cucchi, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1986, p. 27).