Crux Galerie is delighted to present Leonardo Pucci's second solo exhibition, titled Flowers.
Opening on Thursday, November 25th from 18:00 till 22:00.
Behind the simplicity of the title is an invitation from the artist to reflect on the relationship between beauty and control, between the incarceration of aesthetic ideal and the liberating power of bodily impulse.
Approaching cut flowers with the Japanese art of Shibari and capturing the result in highly sensual photographic images, Leonardo Pucci highlights how the obligation of beauty is a cultural construction designed to seize control and power over the body.
As the artist explains: “Much has been written about flowers and their symbolic value in the history of civilisation but ultimately, in every mythological or cosmogonic tale, the flower is the archetype of itself. The archetype of a life that keeps on living, a perpetual cycle of renewal and rebirth.
The flower is a symbol of human existence and, in its cyclical self-affirmation, it implicitly exalts us and the perpetuation of our desires, of our passions, of our need to project ourselves into the future as well as the entropic torment of our bodies and their creative force.
This intrinsic complexity and this dual generative power are constantly censored through violent cultural objectification: if the symbol of the flower is so often reduced to mere fleeting and ephemeral beauty, so the body is forced to extol a normative aesthetic ideal that feeds on narcissism, performativity, solipsism and egocentrism.
And this glorifying of beauty at all costs not only dictates a certain appearance but certain actions, certain behavior, that is, cultural constructions whose ultimate aim is to control the body. Because the body is an instrument of power, it is the political place par excellence, where interests, conflicts and prohibitions come together.”
The catalyst for this project was a Hojō Jutsu manual that the artist found among his books during the lockdown over these past two years of the pandemic