Quel pazzo di Paolo Uccello
Renata Fabbri is pleased to present Quel pazzo di Paolo Uccello, the first solo exhibition by Domenico Ruccia (Bari, 1986) hosted at the project room of the gallery, Sotto. Curated by Lorenzo Madaro, the show brings together a series of unknown paintings inspired by the body of work of Florentine Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello.
“That fool of Paolo Uccello, in the space of a few years gave us all the possible hypotheses, he addressed all the issues, his approach was a new way of dealing with a situation. If we move through the centuries, we realise how things, already envisioned by Paolo Uccello – accentuating the perspective, changing certain aspects of it, continuing to change – are taken on in depth, until we arrive at Modern Art in which we no longer have the central perspective point, but the thousand perspective points of Cubism”, writes Luciano Fabro (Lezioni 1983-1995, edited by S. Fabro, Libri Scheiwiller, Milan 2022) about the extreme persistence of the lesson of this master, author of masterpieces such as St. George and the Dragon (1460 ca., National Gallery, London) and The Battle of San Romano (Uffizi, Florence).
Domenico Ruccia constantly works towards a redefinition of icons and visual elements from different fields: history of art, folklore, kitsch, cinema and much more. In this cycle of works dedicated to Paolo Uccello, Domenico Ruccia makes us realise how his is not only a discourse within painting, but first and foremost within the genesis and persistence of certain images. Thus, on the apparently flat surface of his oil-painted canvases, many scenes appear, tales of nature and dragons, but also pigs in the act of mating, while a pre-metaphysical landscape with a dim yet imaginative light builds an impalpable and dreamlike architecture.
Nothing surreal, of course. Domenico Ruccia’s work is real to the extent that it is sifted by a centuries-old memory capable of regenerating images, of reworking them, of returning them to us with his own gaze, that is often dense with wonder. The strength of Domenico Ruccia’s work lies precisely in that vocation towards the coexistence of worlds that fall within a specific aesthetic, cultural, visionary and at the same time real, concrete, palpable climate.
Therefore, his painting – he already proved this with a previous cycle dedicated to cinema and music – is a great journey in which to recognise the roots of an Italian and an international culture, deeply rooted in the stratification between folklore and research, high and low, sophisticated plurality and absolute simplicity of forms, settings, constructions. It is no coincidence that he says: “I always start from a real fact, belonging to the past, from which I then build on through images and imagination. If anything, the image becomes the right tool to misinterpret history, and then change it”.
