EUGENIO CUTTICA
“EPIFANIAS” by Eugenio Cuttica I Fundación Cajasol Huelva | From September 19 to November 10, 2023 | Sala El Comercial, Huelva, SPAIN
Mysticism of the Face, Moon, Nature-Abundance, and Eternal Return
Over the years, Eugenio Cuttica's work has developed a circuit of concepts and images intertwined to delve into the relationship between beauty, existence, consciousness, and creation. The current exhibition is an exercise in synchronizing these fundamental ideas and a style that integrates influences of the new figuration with his particular symbolic language. The human being and nature, spirituality and quantum physics will always be the epicenter of his artistic production, synthesized here in: Mysticism of the Face, Moon, Nature-Abundance, and The Eternal Return.
Mysticism of the Face reveals the power of the inner gaze through portraiture, as a bridge that makes the invisible visible, a plastic formula where the essential surpasses and goes beyond all physical appearance. In its oversized and monochrome format, it challenges us through deep contemplation or a ritual of awareness of being. Alongside this imposing figurative representation, the Argentine artist presents a series of portraits that translate the individual energetic emanation or revelation of the aura (energy, radiation, color), as a phenomenon between existential epilogue and quantum mechanics. The possibility of subordinating the abstract quality to the figurative is a constant in his work and serves as the justification for another connecting and recurring element in Eugenio Cuttica's work: Moon. Moon is a nine-year-old girl who symbolizes the awakening of consciousness to the surrounding world, the intuitive ability to discover reality without the burden of social constructions and cultural stereotypes. She usually appears accompanied by a chair, an element alluding to wisdom and rest. Moon is a permanent source of light, a spiritual and vital attribute, the balance between hope and truth, the unity between the sacred and nature.
Another pillar in Eugenio Cuttica's career is the representation of nature. It is impossible to understand his work and thought detached from the natural world. Nature-Abundance is a concept that reflects a giving, exuberant, yet also complex nature, represented with an order and scale that symbolize human dominion, a phantasmagorical idealization, and an excessively structured ecology. The opulence and wild beauty versus the land of large crops, economic abundance, and social poverty. His landscapes as large scenographies also symbolize an autobiographical passage, from the provided land to the sought-after land and the wild nostalgia that coincides with the artist's own move from Argentina to New York City.
This journey will also be the raw material of the last concept: the Eternal Return. Cuttica adapts the myth of Jonah and the whale, whose protagonist questions his own existence being dragged into a tragic experience to later reemerge with greater strength and wisdom. The philosophical concept of Eternal Return refers to the transcendence between an instant and eternity, the cyclical temporal structure, victory, and the absolute. Time understood as a curl between concretion and abstraction and the art of Eugenio Cuttica as its symbol, proof, and answer: the black boat and the cherry blossom, the whale, the face and identity, the incandescent body, the journey...
