Dario Guccio

Mostra monocroma

from 09.05.2023 to 08.07.2023

Out of Time, 2023 is the title of the only work by Dario Guccio (Ischia, 1988) presented on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Baleno International. Out of Time is also the title of the song by Britpop group Blur. Released in 2003, the song influenced the music subculture of generations of young people born between the mid-1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. 

and you've been so busy lately / that you haven't found the time / to open up your mind / and watch the world spinning gently out of time.

Damon Albarn writes a minimalist ballad, a mix of numbness and dynamism, an oxymoron between the absence of any limit and a sense of powerlessness.

The song is a subdued and restrained hymn to universal and transcendent love. Like the song, the art work contains an immersive and perturbing feeling. Installed in the centre of the space, it cuts through the gallery like a backdrop or a screen; somewhere between a starry night and a bas relief, several moving silhouettes can glimpsed. 

At first glance, the sensation is to look at a slow motion picture, an overlapping of frames within the same scene, perceivable through few elements, like the wind moving the figures' hair.      

The same breeze that in the world of manga blows and ripples landscapes and characters, which often signals moment of introspection in the narration. The figures cut by Guccio resemble Nana, a manga written and drawn by the author Ai Yazawa. Constantly urged by the exercise of looking inwards and outwards, these figures embody a precise mechanism of laying bare.

Guccio is part of a generation of artists who uses and recodes images through a dadaist approach. The immediacy of his historical references is evident in the methodology of image synthesis and the colour palette that recalls the spatial investigations of Lucio Fontana and Paolo Scheggi. The artist appropriates these references as if they were props in the theatre of “Italianism” and codifies an entirely new and rigorous language. Drawing and volumes extrusion are hidden quotations and a clear testimonial to a tradition of costume, drawing, theatre and performativity of objects/subjects. Patterns and layers, void and density are structured like a Rei Kawakubo dress in a Commes De Garços release. Impossible not to notice the artist's strong inclination towards the fashion universe. But clothes, like people, perform within spaces that the artist thinks and imagines. Like the backdrops created by Mario Ceroli on the occasion of the performance of Fanciulle del West (1980-81), a space limited by a fixed structure where to inscribe forms and create suggestive scenarios. Guccio’s leather silhouettes act like Kiki Kogelnik's Hangings, like bodies held on hangers, stripped and emptied of all carnality, waiting to be moved or simply shown.

Text by Lucrezia Galeotti