Portrait of Enzo Cucchi, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui.
Enzo Cucchi possesses a poetic sensibility that resists categorization—subtle, enigmatic, and charged with symbolic force. A central voice in the Italian Transavanguardia, he has spent decades crafting a visual language that evades fixed definitions. His work is radically intuitive, mythological, and defiant of context. Instead, it unfolds like a dream: layered, fragmentary, and permeated by a metaphysical current that resists resolution.
This spring marks his return to New York with Mostra Coagula, a solo exhibition at Vito Schnabel Gallery—his first major US show since his landmark exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1986. To mark the occasion, we spoke over Zoom, in Italian. Cucchi declined to be seen on camera. Instead, he constructed a miniature stage before his screen: a mise en scène animated by a small, mysterious creature performing in front of a painting, with a handwritten note in the background reading “Great Alex K., Great Julian S.”—a reference that will resurface in the conversation.
Ginevra de Blasio (Rail): Enzo, your exhibition titled Mostra Coagula, which recently opened at Vito Schnabel Gallery in Chelsea, marks your return to the United States after over twenty years. The title refers to the process of coagulation, meaning the thickening—the joining of scattered elements into a form—and it resonates a bit with alchemical imagery. Can you tell us more about the title and whether it is connected to this moment of return? How does it feel to present your work here after twenty years?
Enzo Cucchi: Yes, you see, titles are completely replaceable. It depends on the mood, on many things, on when you are asked about it. I’m not interested in titles in a formal sense, but simply as a greeting in a certain state of mind towards the person and the place I’m about to encounter. It doesn’t have a particular meaning, and it wasn’t what I was trying to achieve.
As for the twenty years, as you said: do you know what twenty years means? Of course, those years were necessary.
Look, do you see what’s behind me? There’s something in the air, something written, right? Can you see the writing?
Rail: Yes, the writing behind says “Great Alex K., Great Julian S.”
Cucchi: Well, for example, speaking of years, you know, Alex means … you can imagine, it’s directed at Alex Katz. I think his work is so special, it has had a much more special evolution—even more so than Willem de Kooning’s from that American generation—and that’s very special. It pleases me, it gives me great personal pleasure.
As for Julian Schnabel, I think he was already much better than Jean-Michel Basquiat at the time, and he is still better today. This is what matters, you know? It’s about the America of all of us, but I’m very pleased to have rediscovered, after twenty years, in a certain way, the same quality, the same emotions, and in the end, the same values.
Rail: In 1986, you had a retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York. Do you feel—
Cucchi: Is there such a thing as a “retrospective,” for example? As you see, even back then, someone named these things with a definition—“retrospective”—so it’s something linked to time, or it might seem that way. But in reality, it’s not like that, is it? Because even in that case, I did an exhibition just like I would in any other place, but it was because it was necessary to go through these things to then meet again after twenty years. Probably if I had done, as you say, a “real” retrospective, maybe today we wouldn’t be talking about all this.
Rail: Do you feel that your work has changed since that show at the Guggenheim?
Cucchi: It’s not that the work hasn’t changed; it’s always changing. It’s us who never change. The work always changes inevitably. The only work that always changes is an artist’s work. All other disciplines don’t really change, because they have an idea of power, so they develop something along a linear trajectory, under this form of power and so-called “future.”
You know, art doesn’t care about any of this; art doesn’t care about the future, and so it has this type of capacity and wonder, precisely because it’s the only material that can change—it must! And it changes every day while always staying the same.
How does science change, for example? It’s like a single, rigid body, but that must be compact, it must always be that: recognizable. Art is exactly the opposite.