BOLOGNA ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS – MATTEO LUCCA

If we could see with our own eyes all the pollutants that blossom in our mind, we would behold a different view. We wouldn’t have the traditional pollutants of the body, those suited to discharge, detoxify, lubricate and that don’t usually look good. It is waste – necessary, but waste.
We too wander the world scattering in the environment substances that are victims of a chemical process and a transformation. The noble centre for thought, reason, sorrow and joy: our mind, cannot but release hundreds of gentle pollutants every instant. And we can’t see them.
In Matteo Lucca’s work the crystallization of a frame of this alchemy has been made possible; here the noble mind leaves the scene in a continuous recycling of elegant forms – an elegance that is, by now, convulsive, messy and loud: fabrics. Colourful and beautiful fabrics, flourishes and glittering ornaments that, like a newborn, suddenly find themselves deprived of their habitat. Curtly evicted from their placenta they can live for only a few seconds, and so they get entangled, frantically looking for something to cling to. They seem to swell out like bubbles bound to burst; in the end, though, having reached a paroxysm, they resign themselves and melt in a pathetic and highly dignified embrace of death.
And does the mind know anything about all this process? Not at all, it is there, busy grinding and destroying and expelling new thoughts-fabrics uninterruptedly. With all the heaviness, melancholy and malady of lead. Lead never knows anything. Yet everything rises towards the ceiling like a totem with an exotic relish, like an idol from faraway lands that declines death in the most composed manner, but ends up by gaining life. Elsewhere. 

Text by Jacopo Flamigni