Artist: Emanuele Marcuccio
Exhibition title: Lausanne
Venue: Ellis King, Dublin, Ireland
Date: March 24 – April 29, 2017
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Ellis King, Dublin
01 – Lausanne
Lausanne my beloved. You are not as beautiful as the Etruscans town of my ancestors. Your food is barely decent. COOP cheese sandwiches are overrated as well as the dead butterflies of Nabokov that are rotting under the glass of the zoological museum. Beau Rivage Hotel is fabulous. Maybe the best brunch in town. Your connections with Italy are not so bad. When I want to come to the opening of the Venice Biennale without accreditation (although asked many times via the patronage of ECAL) I take an Eurolines bus because its easier, let’s say. Lausanne and your bridges… you could be the Constantine of Switzerland. You don’t have the peculiar charm of Baden Baden, the one beautifully understood by Pierre Boulez before he died. Neither the attraction of Aix-La-Chapelle, which Charlemagne conserved as a secret in his royal tomb. A. Cravan got your singularity, but he passed away too soon in Mexico to reveal it. Hmmm, my petite Lausanne, I still can’t leave you.
02 – The Sandwiches of the Artists
Fluffy, gorged of wheat and generously paved with nut butter. This is how Mark Rothko liked to have them. Barnett Newman was less tepid. With him, the bread was home to a violent battle between a dash of mustard and a not less proud pillar of bacon. Apparently in the mid 40’s Pollock used to stack the meat in his sandwich as a reference to the jambon quiches that Picasso cooked during his surrealist period. Sandwiches are paintings for the stomach.
03 – Pizza Gate and Spirit Cooking
I once met John Podesta in a modest pizzeria in DC called Comet Ping Pong. John is used to come here each month after his exhausting trips to the Fiji Island where he runs a luxury resort. It is a place of informal meetings for the establishment of Washington, the same group of people who also travel to Basel and share his taste for art. Although the place is famous for unpretentious southern cuisine and Hawaiian style pizzas, it has become in few years the hot spot to finalize business deal and protect political interests of the laid-back elite. On Formica tables, apparently inspired by Artschwager and minimal bench by Zobernig, are concluded lobbying agreements and others master plans adored by Soros and consorts. In 2016, an adventurous investigator discovered that the multiple roman style bodies that ornate the walls of Comet Ping Pong were in fact a crypto-pedophilia language. Quickly dozens of net warriors started to decipher the hermetic symbolism of this not so innocent pizzeria. Quickly, they discovered the creepy taste of John for macabre sceneries. Indeed, in the acajou staircase of his apartment, one of the most expensive of D.C (the apartment not the staircase), among different pictures of his family traveling in Messina, ironic Carrefour logo by Haim Steinbach and XIX century ‘s paintings of Egyptian ruins, a silver decapitated cadaver by Louise Bourgeois was held in the sight of all. The sculpture in question was the reproduction of a hideous picture of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victim, the boogeyman of Milwaukee. Was Hillary, who came many times to eat dorados at Podesta’s house, aware of this luciferian “artwork”?
04 – 0 to 4
“Such a lack of directness, of clear-headedness, almost, was typical. What was probably the most serious thing was that they were cruelly lacking in ease – not material, objective ease, but easiness, or a certain kind of relaxedness. They tended to be on edge, tense, avid, almost jealous. Their love of well-being, of higher living standards, came out most often as an idiotic kind of sermonizing, when they would hold forth, they and their friends, on the sheer genius of a pipe or a low table; they would turn them into objets d’art, into museum pieces.” Georges Perec, Things, 1965
05 – Shaping the city
Tom Waits is in Sonoma. Breton continues to languish on the dry rocks of Saint-Cirq Lapopie. Valloton exults when testing the syrupy tastes of apples from the indolent canton of Vaud. Roberto Matta doesn’t like Meudon, it reminds him of the illustrative works of Cocteau, or Bérard aka Bébé who made frescos in the fish restaurant La Méditerannée in Paris. Filliou is in Eyzies-de-Tayac because it’s Filliou. Joan Mitchell is drunk, way too drunk. Ian Sinclair walks and walks again. Jenny Holzer is bored in Karlsruhe. Ligotti dreams about Chicago Style Pizza. Hanna Schygulla is back to Berlin. Guadalupi finish a book devoted to the diamonds of Trieste. Jakob Von Hoddis talks about the end of the world. Stephen Sprouse is still a designer. Karl Gestner, also, he doesn’t know if he still appreciates the Swiss Air logo. Roorda thinks about suicide. Stevenson is undecided, does he have to follow his donkey on the escarped passages of the Cevennes? Ezra Pound is in Gascogne drinking wine. Lily Rose Deep is only interested by the unknown. Marcuccio only works for her astonishment. Cimino is in Aspen and Huppert in Malina. Tom Waits is still in Sonoma.
06 – Ornament and crime
An acrylic ribbon ornaments the streamlined hood of a Mercedes suggesting the beginning of an adventure without risks: the honeymoon. Jaipur, Punta del Sol, Zanzibar, the world is already full of packaged destinations, where the food is spicy but not enough for gastric perturbations. Back to its parking, the car laments that its ergonomic ambitions have been again violated. Ornament is crime once again. Every object should be as pure as a flag: sharp, generic, individualistic. Banality and distance are true wealth. Less embellishment more speed. Design is tolerable only when cold and metallic. A permanent priapism that emasculate our horizon of its silk, lace and satin cadavers. Industrial design doesn’t exist anymore. It is punctuated with stickers and frivolous 1 dollar decorations. Once heralded, the age of the constructivist has burst. We leave among unmodern people.
-Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou
Emanuele Marcuccio, MOMA, 2017, Powder coated steel, 160 x 40 x 25 cm (63” X 16” x 10”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, D’Après Cavenago, 2017, Mild steel, 115 x 195 x 23 cm (45” x 77” x 9”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Centre Pompidou, 2017, Powder coated steel, 160 x 40 x 25 cm (63” X 16” x 10” )
Emanuele Marcuccio, Centre Pompidou, 2017, Powder coated steel, 160 x 40 x 25 cm (63” X 16” x 10” )
Emanuele Marcuccio, Lucky Boxes, 2017, Stainless steel, 30 x 30 x 60cm (12” x 12” x 24”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Lucky Boxes, 2017, Stainless steel, 30 x 30 x 60cm (12” x 12” x 24”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Lausanne Palace, 2017, Powder coated steel, 100 x 160 cm (39” X 62”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Free Spirit, 2017, Screenprint on canvas, acrylic paint, 173 x 115 cm (68” X 45”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Everyday is Sunday, 2017, Screenprint on canvas, acrylic paint, glass, paint brush, paint tube, 176 x 117 cm (69” X 46”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, A Sculpture on a Chair, 2017, Chair, stainless steel, 82 x 37 x 40 cm (32” X 15” x 16”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Cometa Donatella, 2017, Latex, Kapok, 200 x 70 x 30 cm (78” X 27” x 13”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, The Rain Dance, 2017, Screenprint on canvas, acrylic paint, paint tube, 173 x 113 cm (68” X 44”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Paintings are Sandwiches for the Stomach, 2017, Screenprint on canvas, acrylic paint, paint brush and paint tube, 173 x 118 cm (68” x 46”)
Emanuele Marcuccio, Flag, 2017, Wall mural, 375 x 250 cm (148” x 98”)