Solo exhibition, MyOwnGallery Via Tortona 27 bis Milan. November- January 2005.
The MyOwnGallery gallery opens its activity with the latest sculptures by resident artist Flavio Lucchini, who has been investigating the relationship between art and fashion for years through his Dress Art. The exhibition is curated by Martina Corgnati.

"Flavio Lucchini is openly in love with Canova because, in my opinion, he identifies with the latter's attempt, aimed at subtracting beauty from the ephemeral. It is no coincidence that his work on sculpture carried out in the last fifteen years responds to a need Neglecting, for the moment, the large bas-reliefs and totems in metal, which require specific analysis, and focusing instead on the recent bas-reliefs and sculptures in plaster and above all fiber and resin more or less lacquered and glossy, it is immediately evident how the look of the artist, accustomed over the decades of conception and direction of the best Italian fashion magazines (from Vogue to Mondo Uomo, from Lei to Moda) to interpret, choose, appreciate, decode the dress, the image, the transfigured body, has sought with care, immense dedication and unlimited commitment, the right way to fix the impression of beauty absorbed and extolled over the course of a lifetime in more stable and more perfect forms than a photograph printed on glossy paper, he declares. Hence, this transient world, this precipitate of current affairs called made in Italy and that Lucchini himself greatly contributed to create in the years of journalistic militancy, is purified into perfect plastic forms, unharmed, seductive, preciously rippled surfaces; or furrowed by geometric folds, by corners and edges and sharp protuberances. Always ambiguous surfaces: in fact, if at an adequate distance the shape of the dress emerges clearly recognizable, the simulacrum of the female body recreated by the covering, getting closer the eye gets lost in the landscape of reliefs and depressions, of sudden acute and wide backgrounds that they seem to disperse in unspecified distances… In every work, we are dealing with pure, empty forms, uninhabitable by any body, by any overly defined subject. The dress, in fact, is a subject in itself and does not need further justifications if we exclude, perhaps, the memory of the drapery, which always inhabits it. Not for nothing, well before and well beyond fashion, the paths of painting and sculpture can also be considered from the visual angle of the representations of fabrics, brocades, silks, carpets, veils and cloaks that transfigure the shapes of bodies, of almost living flaps that hide forbidden visions, or of precious accessories that ennoble saints and virgins and historical figures. Flavio Lucchini knows this and, while not getting lost in the ocean of possible quotes and references, shows a certain delight in lingering in the possibility of a pure drapery, praised and in a certain sense "freed" from the main theme. For this reason, if a reliable history of drapery could ever be written (to my knowledge, a feat that has not yet attempted anyone), the artist's bas-reliefs should necessarily be included, almost as a conclusion and meditation. 
From the previous Dress Memory, white bas-reliefs as the future “archeology of fashion”, the very latest Ghosts were born which, once again, extend into three dimensions, giving up the complete safety of their own candid casing; shapes that are always very soft but now decidedly more courageous, abstract configurations suspended in the void of our space. Why ghost? These monumental presences, freed from the guided simulation of the relief, where the gaze cannot get lost as it is by the edge of the plastic "window" cut out by the artist, stand out around us with the peremptory nature of authentic icons. It seems that Lucchini raises the question of their identity less and less. Sometimes, in fact, the imagination involuntarily runs towards the plant world, as if the exuberant richness of the fabric were transformed into a florilege of tendrils, into a composition of luxuriant and bursting foliage. Latent metamorphosis of an open work, aware of the transfigured surrealism of Tanguy, Max Ernst, Toyen. They are ghosts of memory, elements that emerge and seem to occupy the consciousness. Their grandiloquence and monumentality does not prevent the artist from taking care of all the details, from carefully modeling every curve and every ripple. In a certain sense, it is a question of progressive translations of scale, of passages from the small, indefinite, to the large and very precise. Of course, in these shapes, if you look closely, you can clearly recognize a sleeve, a neckline, a model; but the evidence tarnishes, a moment later, to give way to another possibility, a wedge, a trunk, a sequence of overhanging floors. Apollo and especially Daphne: classicism is very rich in metamorphosis, sudden transformations, twists and turns. In the dress, or rather in its plastic trace, Lucchini finds the perfect interpreter of the poetic license and creative exuberance of the ancient tale. In the dress, with the dress you can do everything, even recreate a kind of mythology of form from scratch since, after all, art always, almost inevitably, produces a contact with the mythical dimension ". 
Martina Corgnati

Exhibition shot with Dress Memory on the walls and Ghost Sculpture

Crusty irond Dress Totem in MyOwnGallery

Some elegant maquettes on white chalk

Some maquettes in MyOwnGallery passage

Installation shot