Guido Costa Projects has the pleasure to announce the opening of "26" by Cuoghi Corsello. The exhibition will be open to the public from 26 April 2012 at via Mazzini 24 in Torino in 7 p.m., and will be on display until 26 June, every day during gallery hours.
Active since the late 1980s, Cuoghi Corsello could be considered one of the most creative and lasting examples of artistic collaboration, precursor in many ways to an entire generation of artists who have anticipated aesthetic developments.
Born in Bologna, a stone’s throw from the Neon gallery, birthplace of most Italian contemporary art at the time (from Maurizio Cattelan to Eva Marisaldi), Cuoghi Corsello have spent this century in an extremely radical and consistent personal and solitary research that has become a reference point for an entire generation of Italian artists. His work is characterised by a horizontal and oppositional creativity that often lies beyond the official realm of markets and institutions.
An extreme artistic voyage, penalized in a historic period when appearance seemed the only password, but one that guaranteed, over the years, a growing number of supporters and enthusiastic admirers, inside and outside the art system.
From the dawn of graffiti art, through the first street-art and experimentation with new forms of artistic occupation of urban spaces, until the most recent times, filled with material and technical hybridization, Cuoghi Corsello have anticipated much and preserved much, in an extraordinary adventure of life and art. Their story is local, yet radically international, difficult to categorise or place into narrow currents or movements in contemporary art, frequently so conservative even in their most experimental and open phases.
Cuoghi and Corsello have remained mysterious, frequently confined in one of their many guises (writers, proto-squatters and so forth), but never understood in the solitary complexity of a street epic, among the most seductive and sophisticated in the past decades even outside Italy.
Definitive traces of them are still lacking, thanks to their conscious mimicry and constant work of subtraction and delocation, documentation hardly exists, if not a broad oral history.
Over the years, those who had the good fortune to meet them in one of their occupied buildings found them difficult to forget, just as happened after an important meeting, or one of those happenings that changed everything.
As a gallery owner, I was lucky enough to them in the early days, in the surreal framework of Villa Genziana, the main residence of the couple, where everything was created.
We spent almost thirty years together, between exhibitions here and at the gallery and events outside, like that unforgettable one in Amsterdam: 24 hours non-stop of improvisation in the lower electric and the "bed-in" in a gallery in the "Red-district" as it once was before it became a destination for tourists with strong desires, or on the occasion of “The Secret of Collo”, a sort of electronic elegy in honour of their dead cat, Collo.
Because of this, with great gratitude and feeling I decided to celebrate their twentieth anniversary with an exhibition, attempting to put together all their scattered fragments, year by year, going over their long history, distilled in a great single work in which all their soul, or almost all, finds a place.
The work is a sort of Duchampian "boite en valise", inhabited by Petronilla, Bello, Suf, Nonno Degrado, just to mention a few of the people who are major junctures in their history: they are all original documents, in the form of drawings, photography, light boxes, small sculptures, paintings, organized in a symbolic dialogue and a chronological framework.
A work capable of expressing Cuoghi Corsello, or at least reveal one of the many avatars impersonated by the artistic couple, an image clearly not definitive and, as all the rest, in a constant and dynamic evolution.
This is our Cuoghi Corsello. Thank you Monica, and thank you Claudio!