Cesare Lucchini: Those Who Remain•••••

Quello che rimane - resti, Oil on canvas, 2010

The first UK exhibition by the veteran Swiss artist whose existentialist paintings bear witness to the tragedy of the human condition

Rosenfeld Porcini is pleased to present Those who remain by the Swiss artist Cesare Lucchini. This will be the first UK exhibition of Lucchini’s work and will include both works on paper and recent paintings, displayed over both floors of the gallery.

Throughout his career, Cesare Lucchini has been concerned with the crucial issues of our time, the inhumanity of man, and the plight of the downtrodden. Those who remain is a series of statements expressing these existential concerns. An oil-stranded bird, beak open wide, evokes the British Petroleum disaster of 2010; a helicopter circles in Iraq; a man lies on the ground, watched by a lone wolf or dog; the boats that run the desperate journey of hope and despair between Africa and Lampedusa. Lucchini is deeply moved by the images of suffering he sees portrayed in the global media, and they often provide the spark for a new painting.

“The starting point (for me) to make a painting normally begins from my reflections on one of the dramatic events which take place daily in our contemporary world. Certain realities provoke in me a very strong emotional response, even anger, and, as a consequence they become a reason to begin painting.” Cesare Lucchini

The title of the exhibition is taken from the series of paintings and drawings of prisoners in Dachau, made by the Istrian painter Zoran Music, who was interned in the concentration camp during the war, and with whom Lucchini shared a gallery in Milan. For Luccini, there is always the narrative beneath the abstraction: the pain of those that are left behind.

Lucchini was part of the sea of change that took place in painting during the 1950s and 1960s. In his early years as a painter, there are occasions when Lucchini’s works are purely abstract, where the gesture, space and colour is everything. His development out of the great painterly abstract tradition of the 1950s and the social awareness of the 1960s, and his ability to combine gestural freedom within narrative, has led directly to the originality of his voice in our epoch.

Throughout, there is a tension between darkness and light. The richness of Lucchini’s palette and the density of his brushstrokes provide a kind of visual forest or landscape out of which, little by little, the figure can be made out; the subject partly emerging from, and partly submerged by abstraction. The paintings are never documentary and do not set out to record the events. Lucchini's paintings are lyrical and emotively-charged, with a desperate beauty that has the capacity to move far more than factual or documentary-led descriptions.

Born in 1942 in Bellinzona, Switzerland, Lucchini trained at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he spent the next two decades. In the late 1980s, he moved to Germany, attracted by the vibrancy the art scene and the historical engagement of artists like Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer. He now divides his time between studios in Cologne and Lugano, and works with galleries in Germany and Switzerland. His solo exhibitions include the Mendrisio Palazzo Pollini, Ferrara; Pallazzo dei Diamanti; Locarno Pinacoteca Casa Rusca; and Neuchtel Musee d’Art et d’Histoire. He has a further exhibition planned for the Kunst Museum in Berne in 2013.

“Cesare Lucchini has made a decisive contribution to abstract-expressive painting since the 1960s. With his powerfully energetic art, he has never abandoned the link to the themes of existential realism, as treated by Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. For him painting is never just a decorative or conceptual end in itself”. Matthias Frehner, Director, Kunst Museum, Bern
http://rosenfeldporcini.com/exhibition/cesare-lucchini/