The publication Mezzocane was designed for Enzo Cucchi’s exhibition at Culturgest in Lisbon.
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 cracks 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.
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 testament to the uniqueness of his work.
The exhibition Mezzocane brought together a wide-ranging selection of the paintings, sculptures, and drawings that Cucchi has produced over the last two decades.
The challenge of representing an artist who designed over 100 hundred books forced curators to grapple with the question of what kind of book design would do Enzo Cucchi justice? 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 and transcendental images.
