Cacciola Enzo (1945)

He held his first solo exhibition in 1971 at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, focusing his attention on the dynamics of the relationship between plane and shape and colour.

In 1973 he started working on new materials as alternative to oil on canvas and created his first material pieces, examining only the surface and its linguistic data.

In June 1975 he took part in the exhibition Analytical painting curated by Klaus Honnef and Catherine Millet with concrete paintings to highlight the problems related to the analysis space offered by the materiality of the work.

The participation in Documenta 6 (Kassel, 1977) marks a partial discontinuity with his previous work, due to a reinterpretation in a conceptual key of the artist’s work and function. Starting from 1979, on this basis, he embarks on a path of reflection and research that leads him to work and exhibit overseas, between Washington, Mexico City and Panama City. In 1981 he confronted the themes of the Transavanguardia taking part in the exhibition Pittura in radice by Achille Bonito Oliva and thus opening himself to figuration, which however is perceived and rendered above all in conceptual terms. A further step towards the interpenetration between figurative and conceptual is accomplished with the experience of Short memory painting (Milan, 1982), curated by Viana Conti, aimed at recording the “incursions” of the artist who inserts his figure and his optics in some masterpieces of the eight- and twentieth-century art.

In 1985 he resumed the research on the matter, by examining the rhythm of the interiority on the score of the surface. Around the mid-nineties, he returns to a painting characterized by a conceptual matrix. A painting in which many of the previous experiences were settled and resolved: the cement of the conceptual, the forms of a long association with the geometric abstract, the roughness of a surface reminiscent of the travails of the Transavanguardia, an unprecedented union between matter and geometry able to probe and reveal the intimate algebraic, rational nature of reality.

The latest works, presented in group exhibitions, reveal an openness to compositional solutions guided by the concept of accumulation (Leo Lecci, A research in constant evolution – Galleria 911, La Spezia, 2005)

Currently, its experimentation is aimed at the use of new materials designed for industrial use, where a continuous process of analytical research is present in the work.