Bio

Riccardo Riccucci, 1979, is an artist from Sarnano (Mc).

His approach to the world of artistic expression occurs in full maturity, following a path of deep introspection, character, psychological and emotional analysis, which leads him to radically change his daily "feeling" and social relationships. It is from here that the search for a more direct and more empirical expressive path begins, which flows into experimenting, first with the world of wood, then with other materials that tend to marry harmoniously with wood: his love for epoxy resin is lightning-fast.

Its primordial use reveals itself as the true turning point in the artist's expressive power.

Riccucci discovers in resin a material with infinite possibilities. A fascinating, mysterious, undisciplined, ungovernable, material and evanescent element at the same time. A substance atavistically capable of giving depth and thickness to the works in which it is used, often in union with other elements, such as acrylic colors, enamels, stones, leaves, earth. The bold colors and the toned shades are the essential source of Riccucci's work, psychologically involving the spectator through a decisive and incisive movement, winking at the concept of <em>art pour l'art</em>, taken up in the nineteenth century by Victor Cousin who highlights the autonomy of artistic creation with respect to conceptual dynamics. His art, an innovative revelation for our era, is guided by curiosity and the commitment to pursuing goals not yet known. He is drawn to things that would otherwise be hidden, ignored or discarded and, through collection and research, he reuses a variety of materials, often imbued with a past life, unwitting bearers of a story to tell. The practice in the laboratory is guided by the process: it is a continuous cycle of exploration, excavation and dissection, sometimes delicate, sometimes violent, involving all manner of manual, electrical and mechanical tools to pull, break, cut, burn, scratch and carve.

In abstract expressionism, resins obey the creative impulse of the artist who, far from the concept of mimesis, sets up the expressive discourse with chromatic arguments of contrasting shades and bright timbres. The material, coarse and palpable, seems to want to overcome the two-dimensional limit of the support and, added to the not inconsiderable choice of relevant formats, reinforces the originality of Riccardo Riccucci's style. Even in figuration, his aesthetic research rests on the physicality of painting and on the essentiality of forms, sometimes barely hinted at and free from the marginality of ancillary details. With evident traces of the material path, they reveal the artist's bond with his country of origin and with Nature. The tree, the main subject of his poetics, vibrates with symbolic value but often also represents his states of mind; the use of black in the backgrounds often refers to that indefinite <em>aliquid</em> by which the observer's eye is often captured and intrigued; the central perspectives and the close-ups are elements that contribute to strengthening a coloristic expressiveness of strong emotional impact.

The artistic experimentation of Riccardo Riccucci, through the technique of <em>assemblage</em>, also finds space in the design spheres of Arte Povera. Traceable back to the first experiments of the historical avant-gardes, the works are presented, most of the time, coherent with the poetics of the landscape and Nature, which can be noted already in the figurative language of the artist. Straw, algae or tobacco leaves undergo a transmutation, losing their natural function to assume the status of a work of art. The surface welcomes the ordered, rationalized and rhythmic compositions in sequence, then it volumizes with significant plasticity. It emerges with evident clarity that Riccucci feels the urgency to balance the artistic, instinctive and immediate action of abstract works, with a targeted planning, reworked several times in the materials and structurally oriented to a compositional virtuosity of undoubted aesthetic charm.

Riccardo Riccucci's art is born from his life experiences, his values, the depth and countless nuances of the human soul. The artist experiments with a form of painting that has the task of digging into the mind of the individual, his work becomes a sort of open book, a narration of the emotions, delightful or turbulent, that he feels with the deepest part of his Self. In his works mysterious energies emerge, inhabited by a sort of dreamlike or spiritual mysticism where lines, colors, abstract, real or geometric shapes converge; his painting is instinctive, full of technical experiments and introspection, where essential elements for a continuous and refined personal evolution take over.

“Being an artist is something you carry inside of you forever. You just have to weed the path that leads to it.”

“Being able to make others feel emotions is the most satisfying thing there is.”