In Davide Stucchi’s work, I find three very specific elements that strongly resonate with my being a thespian: the relationship with space, the narrative dimension of the works, and his use of text and words. Talking to Davide – and I’ve been doing so very often for the past 15 years as we are friends – is a logical experience, full of wordplay, humour, and his constant linguistic misdirections. Recounting one of his exhibitions, as I attempt to do here, is an endeavour that could prove to be paradoxical: given that subtraction is the dominant feature of his work, as soon as something is said about it, it is negated.

It is precisely in this visual and conceptual clash (between what is, here in space, and the world to which it alludes, elsewhere) that something true or plausible can be grasped. Already the title, “6, Corso Via”, in Italian, suggests an elusive quality that cannot be resolved: it is an address where no one will be found, from which the recipient has already moved on. The poetics of absence unfold through objects of everyday use or common “encounter” (the streetlights next to which we walk, the mailboxes whose names we never read, the faded and illegible intercoms) and multiply in the absence of a human element, which still lingers around and within those objects.

This is how the shower in an elevator, an inherently absurd space-device, becomes in reality a place of hyper-meaning, where the solitude of the shower intersects with the multitudes that ascend and descend in the elevators of the world: it is the collision between these antithetical dimensions – private and public, promiscuous and reserved, sexualized and sterile – that brings the work’s meaning to life. Evoking and negating, showing and concealing from view: being an artist in the world, to reinterpret and return it, happens by stepping out of the way.

Returning to the mailboxes: instead of nameplates, we find clothing labels reminding us of the recipient’s body, as well as that of the sender, but the bodies are not there. The letters delivered through the fissure, with an intrusive and erotic gesture, could be love poems, gas bills, or blank sheets, it doesn’t matter: the contact, or the search for contact, is the only certain reality, and it happens through the objects. The neon-umbrella simultaneously offers itself to and withdraws from our eyes: an object that by definition is meant to protect, but one which regularly breaks or gets lost, a desperately fragile object tied here to another extreme fragility, that of neon, and from this union of obsolescences emerges an expressive force.

Davide’s work could be accosted to a certain historical Surrealism, were it not for the fact that it is never psychological work, as he himself explained to me in a long voice message from which I extract a small part: “Subtraction creates a problem that is much more important, namely that your body is able to create an anticipation, a desire, it creates a connection, at least in my psychology shaped by various primary traumas, which we can leave there because they make us do beautiful things.” Psychology can remain where it is because what we need to know is in the body, or rather, in the object landscape in the absence – in memory or expectation – of the body. This brings us to the theme of the fetishized switch that interrupts nothing at all, a device for activating and deactivating the aforementioned clashes or short-circuits of sense: buttons on elevators and gates, light switches, object-gestures that have the power to generate or obscure realities and connections.

Light appears and reappears in Davide’s work, a layered, situated light filled with meaning (the beads), like a vision gathering all the eyes that have seen it. Once again, public and private space converge in the object: the small lamps of buildings, entrances, stairwells, seen in perspective, from above or below, or from the side, from a position that is in any case human, may seem like something else, perhaps composing a necklace. The human gaze arranges the world, even in the absence of the human.

It brings to mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontological postulate, “Videor ergo est,” “I am seen, therefore you are,” where it is the gaze of the other that tells me I truly exist, certifying both ends of sight: the one who sees and the one who is seen exist in an irreducible duality. Indeed, in Davide’s world it is as if objects themselves are endowed with a gaze, which they cast upon us, revealing not only that we exist alongside them in the same space, but also reminding us of what we have desired, thought, and feared when we have looked at them, either intentionally or completely distracted, thousands of times. It is a reflective emotion that chases and grabs hold of us in Davide’s rooms, as if the objects, the glimpses, the fleeting views of our habitation were suddenly returning to us a stratification of emotions that we ourselves unknowingly donated, accumulated over time, through distraction and lightness, only to reverse into their opposite: immediacy, density, intensity.

P.S. All of this reasoning of mine is nothing more than a response to that long voice message that Davide sent me to explain the exhibition, which ended like this: “Let me know what you think, I mean, especially let me know if you listened to it at 1x, 1.5x, or 2.5x speed, because if it was at 2.5x, then it could turn into a different exhibition altogether.”

Fabio Cherstich,
Milan, September 2024