Leonardo Cuccoli lives in the countryside around Bologna and at the age of 55 he decided to break the mould approaching the world of art, leaving his professional background behind and embracing all those things that truly were the mirror of his soul.
“One morning, a deep sense of rejection of the dynamics of everyday life led me to reveal my true self by proposing my artistic thought”.
After years spent in the field of corporate communication among art director, copy, graphic design and advertising, he started to promote his own concept of communication through photography. The idea of photography sums up a whole professional life spent learning the technique behind the scenes from all the photographers he met on the way. It is a type of photography aimed to create and explain its own language of expression (recognized sensations), it is the tool to get out of the box. It is not an ordinary model, its purpose is to ensnare, enchant, captivate, embrace the observers with something absolutely unconventional.
Cuccoli’s photography seeps into a black and white technique realized in a personal way, using a palette of all 404 types of grey available, where black is pushed to the extreme and it is composed of the three primary colours. The camera, seen like the soul of photography and pencil for drawing, is a tool to realize pictures. Objects sink in the absolute Black and they take shape through a process of subtraction of the dark where thin and sharp blades of flash light sculpt and highlight the lines of force of the objects themselves.
All the objects have their own energy, an aesthetic identity with lines that uniquely distinguish them, a sort of fingerprint. With his work and attentive gaze, the artist tries to explain and transform into an image what the object tells using his communicative language.
The photograph image is made up of blurred shots, infinite micro details highlighted by the carefully managed depth of field, heightened graphic pictures, framings pushed to highlight the shapes and large format prints.
The work entitled “black&black” is a sort of proof of concept to deliberately reset the usual idea of “time/moment”. The artist even eliminates “space” filling it with the absolute Black, because in his tale time and space are not significant. In this black he hides his story, disappointments, pains and inadequacies. In shooting, he shows his ability to do that, which is continually opposed to the background, that tries to overpower the shot itself. The second “black” in the title refers to the Wood’s lamp (black light) used to illuminate the exhibited pictures.
The UV lamp makes the vision a unique moment since our mind is not used to the ultraviolet frequency and so it transports us into an “experience”. A careful research was carried out for the final realization of the prints. A Direct print on industrial materials with a large format printer, with a color curve that took a long time to optimize the result. All that, lends prints a matte iridescent effect that gives a particular three-dimensional effect to the images.
