Solo exhibition, MyOwnGallery, Via Tortona 27 bis Milan. March- June 2006.
Dolls, little girls, “smurfs” as the artist declares, in a surprised, amused view of femininity. These works are high reliefs painted with fluorescent colours, ironic little figures designed to stress how fresh every cheeky, naïve young woman is. Clothing stops being a tool for acting the diva but aims at playing, laughing, poking fun. There are also paper dolls, sculptures made of white resin that reproduce the original shape, made of sheets crumpled up and recomposed, in a sequence that seems to set itself apart from the plastic perfection of his previous works.
"Everything can be done in and with clothing; you can even build a sort of mythology of the given form from scratch, which is ultimately what art always produces, almost inevitably: a contact with the dimension of legend. An open attitude, then, though at the same time – and maybe in search of some form of balance – the artist designs a thoroughly different type of project, one that is finally inhabited: these are the little women or dolls born in recent months. This time, Lucchini’s aim is to rekindle another component of his especially sweet, affectionate memory. Similar to another, stylised and with large oval faces, though with no eyes, no identity, these figures actually represent life, the feelings that course through the minds of countless naïve young girls who naïvely yearn for the clothing that would make them different, unique, desirable; that would so transfigure their looks as to make them into contemporary divinities. In short, pure representations of desire, of contact. Almost secretly, these dolls also conceal an intimate, minimal autobiographical detail of his wife, the companion of his life, his thinking, choices, adventures and of his daughter Gaja. But it is the merest of insinuations, destined to give the figure that extra touch of tenderness. Otherwise, the dolls are so many multiplied, replicated figures, nobody in particular, not one (the artist is concerned to make this point) but many, a crowd, potentially everyone, all those who would like to be but are not, or are not yet. It doesn’t matter who; it doesn’t matter how many. More or less similar, these sculptures have roughly cylindrical limbs that bring to mind the stocky configurations of Brancusi’s earliest works, the ones more explicitly inspired by primitive cultures, such as First Steps or Little French Girl. These statues are utterly simple, close to the avant-gardes; they have a dimension of necessity that derives meaning from Lucchini’s abiding interest in the primitive arts, in simple and even elementary forms. It is no coincidence that these are dolls: Max Ernst was an avid collector of Kachina Hopi and Zuni figures, which inspired many of his later works; almost rough shapes that lay no claim to represent anything or to naturalism, incarnations of otherness and of the art that bonds the heavens to the earth, nature to mankind. Dolls were also erotic for Kokoschka, who allowed them to re-evoke the phantom of Alma Mahler, who was guilty of a tempestuous, untimely abandonment. In one way or another, dolls are in the focus of the dreams and nightmares of the avant-gardes. Flavio Lucchini now wants to dream that dream again, in his own way, of course, to bring a human presence back among the silent simulacra of plaster and resin, of bronze and gold, that he has been constructing for the last fifteen years. Nowadays, though, face to face with perfect, inviolable clothing, there is an observer – and a female one at that – who has no name and no face, but a desire that makes her come true".
Martina Corgnati
Some coloured Dolls exposed in MyOwnGallery
