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Mezzocane
The publication ‘Mezzocane’ was designed for Enzo Cucchi's exhibition at Culturgest in Lisbon. Enzo Cucchi is one of the most decisive international artists of the last five decades. His name will forever be linked to the term Transavanguardia. Cucchi was one of the undeniable references of this movement and the relevance of his proposals earned him a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1986, when he was just 36 years old. That this relevance continues today is a faithful testament to the uniqueness of his work and how fertile his territory remains today. Mezzocane has brought together a wide-ranging selection of the paintings, sculptures and drawings that Cucchi has produced over the last two decades. The fact that Cucchi has a long experience in the field of graphic design (having designed over a hundred books) brought to this publication the need for a question: after so many artist's books and publications about his work, with an exhibition bringing together works from the last two decades, what book to design for Enzo Cucchi? The answer came from the artist himself and curator Bruno Marchand: to design a publication that wasn't a catalogue and where we had complete freedom to play with Cucchi's poetic, dreamlike but also transcendental images. Enzo Cucchi came up with the name Mezzocane: this myth that tells the story of a dog that was split in half so that an army could pass through the middle of the two parts. This image stayed with us and was transposed onto the text pages in the form of frechas that open up in the typeface, creating blank spaces. To this fundamental element was added the text by Bruno Marchand, which set the tone for the book: a narrative divided into three acts, each of which had to be treated in a different graphic and typographic way. Cucchi's drawings were placed in negative and the book was lined in red, bringing that imagery of the book of hours or a missal that you can always carry in your pocket. Breaking up the negative images are planes of colour and glossy paper that bring us that life in which Cucchi's work is anchored.

Designed items:
- Publication

Client: Culturgest
2024