Anthological exhibition, artworks 1990-2010, Art Point Superstudio Più via Tortona 27 Milan, (con)TemporaryArt 22-30 March 2010.
During the long journey in the fashion world, experienced first from the inside as art director creator of great women’s magazines and then to the pure art solely developed in his atelier, Flavio Lucchini personally rivisited all the meanings of the dress, that is a wrapper which hides not only the body but also the soul of a woman. Today with this book written with Luca Beatrice and with an exhibition cured by the critic in collaboration with Gisella Borioli they take stock of the 20 years and over of the ribirth of Lucchini as an artist. The exhibition is titled “The Vogue lesson” and through the chapters (the same as the book "From Fashion to Art:the Vogue lesson" , Skira edition) tells about the influence of that experience and how it shapes the ethic and aesthetic research of the artist. This event will take part in the circuit (con)Temporary 2010. 

LIKE A BOY. The issue whether fashion can be considered an art form has been argued for a long time. It is indeed a complex and difficult-to-solve issue. First of all, a distinction has to be made by placing on one side the great fashion designers who actually changed the history of fashion and on the other those gifted creative minds who probably would have left a mark in culture even if they had followed other artistic expressions. The first category is quite extensive, the second is much shorter. Whereas here a different story is told. The adventure of a personality, of an intellectual, who has played a major role in “making” the history of fashion and fashion print media, someone who, at his not-so-young age, if we believe his personal data, has jumped on the other side of the fence and reinvented himself as an artist. Therefore, this book bears witness to his latest works, though connecting them to his previous experiences and to his first life, with the ambition they will rightly stand on their own merits. To Flavio Lucchini, any approach towards art is necessarily connected to the body, which represents the model, the contact with reality and its consequent outgrowing. All his sculptures, from the smallest ones to the gigantic ones, respect the proportions of the human silhouette wearing a garment, a dress, a shell. Thus, before being totems, idols, symbolic representations, they are bodies. His sculptures, defined as such because they are tridimensional objects, are extremely sexed, their benchmark is the woman, following curves, shapes, angles. There are illustrious precedents in history which have inspired him: Brancusi’s Endless Column and Max Ernst’s imaginary characters, Picasso’s Africanism and totems, the African idols. When he thinks of a color, Lucchini chooses white, the color of “his” Milan, the city of Fontana, Manzoni and Azimut. Therefore, on one side we sense his visual fancy, his symbolic game, his (female) anthropomorphism and on the other his need for clarity, for synthesis, for the essential, for a formal neatness which explain to us that, in any case, in order to exist, the artwork has to follow the path of conceptual art. Definitions can be frightening. Not a boy, not Lucchini. Maybe it’s his eternal youthful, fearless and extremely inquisitive spirit, which makes him an insatiable connoisseur of techniques and materials. All his creations are born out of a genuine necessary background and, in some ways, more in general, out of the only real lifeblood of the creative universe: the bright curiosity we need when we look at the world. A sort of youthful curiosity, the only one holding the key to expressive imagination and freshness. In the name of an ever-playful, even when critical and slightly accusing, component – the long lines of women wearing burqas, another aspect of the far from gratifying female deification – Lucchini summons irony to talk of fashion rituals and myths. Born as an architect, Lucchini has then discovered design, graphics, fashion and finally art. His aesthetic standard has always focused on the woman, real leitmotiv of a design path which has combined different disciplines in rendering an image always shaped on the female silhouette. The austerity of a tall slender body – the Totems – or the sinuous curves suggesting the soft lines of the Dress Memory. As a fashion editor before and an artist now. The woman glimpsed under the shell of lead and bronze, the child-like woman blinking in the irony of the Dolls, the woman caressed under the innocence of white and virginal memories. And again in those impossible glances which can see without being seen. The woman is always seductive. Aesthetic principle. A fetish to admire and to be charmed by.
Luca Beatrice

white three metres high Totem at the entrance of the exhibition

general view of the first hall

the elegant Dress Memory on exhibition

the section dedicated to Black Code/Dress Code

Portrait series in buzz

cor-ten steel and crusty iron Totem

the precious black room dedicated to the golden artworks

white resin Dolls

the small coloured Dolls

digital painting dedicated to Burqa