Eugenio Percossi

Percossi’s expressive process has a need to continually develop along various trajectories, all the while seeking out – each time through a different means of expression (installation, photography, drawing, video) – the most suitable manner of formally defining all phases (or individual tiles) of the mosaic of creativity.

Embarking down roads which constantly disappear and reappear, the artist examines the ability of art to visually manifest at once both the transmutability of being and the congruence of its substance. Percossi ceaselessly attempts to sketch the profile of a single human being in an attempt to track down the common denominator in which humanity may recognize and subsequently accept its original gene and fated disposition, gravitating towards universality, relying at the same time on the inexplicit power of memory and image; and in grappling with themes such as death or the illusion of immortality, attempts to grasp reality, or better yet: life. An undying search for that wellspring from which flow the various streams of existence finds that all streams empty into the gulf of death. The final consequence of bodily decomposition, fateful accident, tragic obsession, as well as the element of salvation: death in its inevitability interests the artist as space for his investigation and as a unit for perceiving time, understood not as a moment but rather as duration and relation. Percossi’s search, although tending toward the unique, finds precisely in its capaciousness (experiences – personal and collective -, identities, places, persons) the instrument to foil the possibility of “taking time to a moment and the creative project to an epiphany”.

[…]Also the frequent need to inquire into the reason for our existence along with the tireless confession of the viewer, who is forced to confront himself, are mechanisms entering into the internal logic of Percossi’s creative work, suiting both the pressing need to maintain engagement of that periphery of propagation and circularity, but also the necessity of activating a layman’s ritual catharsis, so that a person becomes emancipated from the determination of his/her own influence.

The goal is not so much to obtain an adequate response to one’s questions, but rather to amass and archive “reactions”, so that we may reveal if and how the world imparts certain doubts and fears, metabolizes certain events, fosters one’s own hope, and above all so we may determine what kind of illusions to fill our lives with to cloud our own minds.

Emanuela Nobile Mino from catalogue THE END, 2008

2008 The End, Belavenir Publisher, Prague

2005 Italia a Praga, (exhibition catalogue)

2003 Dizionario della Giovane Arte Italiana 1, with critical text by Angela Madesani, Giancarlo Politi Editore

2002 LIFE, (exhibition catalogue)

2000 Composita Solvantur, (exhibition catalogue),

Guida Degli Artisti Contemporanei di Roma, with critical text by Emanuela

Nobile Mino, Nuova Anterem

2005 Italia a Praga

2003 Dizionario della giovane arte italiana 1, with critical text by Angela Madesani, Giancarlo Politi Editore

2002 LIFE, catalogue

2000 Composita Solvantur, catalogue - Guida degli artisti contemporanei Roma, with critical text by Emanuela Nobile Mino, edizioni Nuova Anterem