MOGADISHNI AAR proudly presents the exhibition ”No Tears” by Italian artist Davide Zucco (b. 1981). In 2000 Davide Zucco received an Art Diploma in Graphics and Printing from Istituto Statale d’Arte, Vittorio Veneto, Italy and is otherwise self-taught. Despite his young age Zucco has exhibited in a long range of solo shows, group shows and various festivals.
Ancient and contemporary artistic traditions meet in Davide Zucco’s exhibition ”No Tears”. The show consists of 9 black and white drawings, 5 colour drawings, a large-scale wall piece and an illustrative audio piece. Rooted in the underground environment and its experiments with new artistic crossovers Davide Zucco’s art encompasses an intrinsic passion for drawing, street art, electronic performances but it also reveals his strong fascination of ancient cultures, which gives his show an old-world feel mixed with a modern approach.
The Good and the Bad, angels and demons are played out against each other in an archaic illustrative playground. The formal expression of Zucco’s works leads the mind to religious art from various cultures, which tends to stress a delicate separation of colours and layers and has a refined sharpness in detail as seen in Maya Indian art, Byzantine icons and Gothic murals. The creatures found in Zucco’s works have reminiscences of the demons and monsters that appear in the periphery of religious scripts and in church interiors of the Middle Ages. But Zucco’s art equally connects with the renaissance of the “monstrous”, observable in today’s preoccupation with various forms of Fantasy such as Dungeons and Dragons, “The Lord of the Rings”, “Harry Potter” and so on.
The legends and divinities created by ancient civilizations out of a respect and fear for nature and the incomprehensible, have always fascinated Davide Zucco. This is why the inspiration for many of his creatures is found in ancient statues, which brings a magical and mysterious feel to the artist’s otherwise contemporary aesthetic. The delicate and dark subjects with the intriguing gazes in Zucco’s works wander between the human, the godlike, the ultra terrestrial as a new sort of species, that seems to incarnate the internal emotional struggles, the hopes and fears that we can all find in ourselves, thus connecting ancient civilizations and modern Man.