Ulises Mazzucca

            Trained in Fine Arts at the National University of Rosario, Ulises Mazzucca’s early work first emerged within the city’s independent art circuit, until he was selected and awarded a scholarship for the federal program La Basurita by the National Arts Fund in 2015, taught by Claudia del Río and Carlos Herrera. Since participating in the 2017 edition of the Artists Program organized by the Art Department of Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, he has been based in Buenos Aires and his career has been steadily on the rise.

            In his drawings and paintings—always approached through the language of installation—Mazzucca explores the subtle link between precarity and vitality, between sensitivity and movement. Contorted figures, caught in everyday situations, trapped within the very surfaces through which they are expressed, populate the artist’s world in a kind of diary of encounters unfolded in space—one that evokes both intimacy and intensity, made possible only by the name of real, direct, embodied experience. In this sense, what might at first seem like a subjective withdrawal accompanied by verbal notations, mutates in the installation context and places emphasis on what is most specific about intimacy: the body.

            Like a skilled physiognomist, Mazzucca works with a bodily grammar that shifts between the naïve and the grotesque to build a small encyclopedia of sensitivity. Using chalk, pastel, or charcoal on paper polyptychs, irregular and angular phenolic panels, or the wood of old wardrobes arranged as folding screens, he recreates a repertoire of embodied emotions. Pain, shame, joy, isolation, exhaustion, and pleasure can all be seen on the surface of the skin and its accidents—wounds, twists, grimaces, and expressions. It is these carefully highlighted details that give the creatures of his universe a unique blend of tenderness and violence.