Perry Rubenstein Gallery is pleased to present Delectable Reason of Sleeps, an exhibition of new work by Santiago Cucullu. This will be Cucullu's first major New York solo show. Cucullu's work includes large wall drawings, sculptural installations and works on paper. His sources are primarily based but not limited to material found in the Federación Libertaria de Argentina (FLA), an anarchist library in Buenos Aires. Mining these historical references, Cucullu surveys the deep and often conflicting events of the forgotten lives and places in Argentine history. One such recurring figure in his work includes Severino di Giovanni, an anarchist writer and leader who left Italy for Argentina in 1927 to escape the Fascists. In the colorfully abstract wall drawings cut from contact paper, Cucullu arranges a sea of images often not knowing the end result. Cucullu maintains an improvisational freedom that stems from capriciously combining more than a dozen individual images to create a single artwork. His compositional choices are often made on site while installing, adding yet another element, a performative one, to the mix that includes the traditions of drawing and painting.
For Cucullu's exhibition at Perry Rubenstein Gallery, the artist will exhibit a profusion of mixed media works including: several angular aluminum sculptures derivative of anthropomorphic figures; a multicolored, multilayered table skirting piece made of fabric; watercolors relating to a work he created in Mexico; and a dynamic wall drawing enveloping the total space of the gallery.
In Delectable Reason of Sleeps, Cucullu engages the themes of choice, implication, and control that exist in both waking life and in dreams, yet focuses most specifically on the gap that subsists between these two mental states. He explores the correlation between the conscious and unconscious and how these perceptions parallel the life cycle. Unique to this exhibition, Cucullu relates the transient characteristics of dreams to the experience of airline transportation and its intrinsic juxtaposition of static and motion. Cucullu's movable sculpture illustrates non –form through form, change and subsequently captures the unreal. Pillows, suitcases and fabrics conjure sensations of travel while symbolizing the remote detachment associated with sleep. The surrounding assortment of watercolors and wall drawings ultimately serve as a colloguing of forms unknown, blurred by affects of motion.
Cucullu received his M.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1999 and his B.F.A. from the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. He has held residencies at the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and ARCUS in Japan. Recent solo projects include exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; NOVA, Milwaukee; and a forthcoming show at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle
scheduled for Fall 2005. Group exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney Biennial; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico City; and, New
Museum for Contemporary for Art, New York. He currently lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.