Argentinean born, artist Santiago Cucullu creates multi-media works that culminate in spatially unified installations. Often arranged with elaborate wall-sized murals, sculpture, and vibrant works on paper, Cucullu emphasizes the subtleties of intuitive pacing and spatial orientation experienced in his broad installations. Specifically, Cucullu creates works using a duality of materials and appropriation to indicate the oscillation and ability of objects to collapse on themselves while activating an exhibition space.
In a description of his work the artist Michelle Grabner comments: “a duality of materials and appropriation that indicate the oscillation and ability of the objects to shift between a given formal solution, and the ultimate collapsibility in the overall appearance of the work. This undermines the general hierarchy in the relationship between the institution, the viewer and the object.”
Specifically elements in the work reflect moments from everyday life that act to displace or highlight frictions that we encounter. Using imagery from one specific place to disrupt ideas of a uniformed reality by displacing representations of a particular culture into another. Allowing this representations to reside side by side to emphasize social fictions that are use to navigate different societal structures.
Cucullu currently lives and works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Boston, Massachusetts. He received his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and his BFA from the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. A former resident of the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Cucullu’s work has been exhibited at a number of institutions, including the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, among others.
“Over the past 25 years I have focused on creating large scale installations that emphasis a variety of media including painting, video, and sculptural elements to involve the physical, social and aesthetic possibilities of traditional exhibition spaces, public spaces, found situations, architecture, and the natural sense of dérive we feel as we move through the world.
Most recently my practice has been paired down to drawings and paintings that examine language and writing as well as abstraction. I think one of my favourites, which I won’t show you, comes from an idea couched in Russian Suprematism that idea that. ‘Abstract planes of color are vividly anti-materialistic and powerfully unstable.’ My idea of painting exists in relation to a host other materials and larger signifying framework. This
can encompass site specific murals and a primary goal is to let the word outside of an artwork leak or worm itself in for the viewer.
I particularly like the idea that the work might act as a type of rupture or marker in my own and a viewers’ understanding of the world.
Often the materials I use to make works are culled from ephemera of my life. I figure these
experiences form my world and the language I assign to the world and how I feel about it. These snippets of phone conversations, found sounds, and an assortment of memories, sketches and photographs of places, situations, and people become source material for more complete objects and installations.”
