Lucia Marcucci - The secrets of langage

Born in Florence in 1933, Lucia Marcucci is one of the main protagonists of visual poetry in Italy and one of the major figures of the Gruppo 70, which she officially joined in 1965. The artists of this group aimed to revalue language in a period of frenetic mass media development. The word thus became an object, with its own autonomy in the midst of new communication systems. The relationship between ‘image’ and ‘word’ becomes their favourite linguistic experimentation playground and collage their medium of expression.
Constructed from magazine clippings and advertisements with messages often drawn from the vocabulary of comic book speech bubbles, Lucia Marcucci’s works reinterpret, with provocation and irony, political and social issues of her time, emphasising the condition of women in contemporary society and the commodification of their image.

In the early 1970s, the artist, like other visual poets, experimented with the use of emulsion on canvas (a photographic transfer technique), in many cases appropriating images from the history of art. The use of black and white and the resulting flatness of the surface allow her to make incisive the juxtaposition or sometimes the underlining of the text and the image. From 1978 onwards, the works show traces of her physical presence through handwriting. The slogans and images are more autobiographical or anthropomorphic.

The most recent works (2000 – 2010), offer hybrid research approaching poetry, music, performance and mass communication and recall above the extraordinary power of the image. In the “Città Larga” series, the works are made by manipulating a type of street advertising that was widespread and ubiquitous at the beginning of the millennium: fabric banners hanging from streetlights in urban areas. These advertisements often convey images conceived according to a popular logic that never stray far from the most ingrained clichés. The artist then uses them to change their meaning or to accentuate the absurdity of the relationship between image and text.