Eva Zuccolo represents a fairly clear synthesis of arts in the Veneto and Friuli regions. She trained in Veneto (for example, at the International School of Graphic Design in Venice) and currently resides there, but her ideology is especially linked to this Region. She affirms the existence of an interior city, a sort of place of the soul, as Venetian artists from ‘veduta’ landscape artists to Emilio Vedova have often done. However, she was born in Friuli and her exploration of material, her manual skills and the almost physical work that she has done over the years to build, shape and expose her material point to painstaking concrete, manual work that is typical of Friuli. The philosophy of work and of investigating reality is the basis of any key to interpreting the dimension of creative skill. The basis for interpreting Eva Zuccolo’s painting is the construction of invisible cities, of cities of the soul, in which the self investigates and becomes lost in a thousand signs, in a multitude of traces that lead back to these places of the soul, which reconstruct a sense of time. A city is, ultimately, a place where time has passed, the time of an individual self that runs through the urban space and the time of collective history that invades the area each of us can inhabit. In short, the urban space is a space both for the self and for others. It is a space full of traces, signs, scratches, pain and pleasure, of depression and the joy of belonging. In the urban space – and therefore in the spaces that Eva Zuccolo creates – there is something impenetrable and, at the same time, something visible and immediate. Man and society leave signs, whether these are fortresses, castles, pyramids, rocks or huts and the freedom of the self is the axiom of the city as a symbol of the expectations and hopes of society and the individual. Eva Zuccolo’s painting therefore always underlines the light of the self that longs for constructive freedom and is inclined to construct, while stigmatising destruction and non-being. For Eva Zuccolo history is a perennial challenge between building and destroying, a kind of dialectic good and evil in which, of course, good is represented by building and evil by destroying. However, destruction leaves indelible traces that are in turn the conditions for new, more optimistic construction.
Zuccolo’s painting echoes the words of Charles Dickens in Pictures from Italy: “the fire that illuminates streets, severe buildings and imposing towers, fed by celestial rays, continues to burn even after the flashes of the battle have died away”. Eva Zuccolo knows that in the brief century – as the 20th century was known – the clamour of battle destroyed cities, but from the traces that remained came new hope, new construction, the challenge of the self that will not accept being annihilated by the negativity of history, but always leans towards rebuilding and is always under the illusion that it can start again. The wealth of history does not only lie in its cathedrals or pyramids, but also in the vital force of the self and society that accept the challenge and continue to rewrite the stones of light anew. Therefore, fire does not consume but feeds rebirth and return, because Man – who forges his own destiny and rebuilds his life – redesigns the architecture and urban plan of the city and, from the non-being of the ruins, creates new being and new hope. Eva Zuccolo’s philosophy is accompanied by a technique that includes dematerialisation and materialisation, the use of mortar and sand and oil and acrylics in, as I said earlier, tireless, experimental manual shaping, in a clear vision of material that forms and crumbles, that dilutes, affirms and denies, with light and shade, lumps of material and chromatic glows. Eva Zuccolo’s recent work, which aims to discover the mystery of the invisible city that lies within each one of us, dissolves in the material nature of the forms that suggest, once again, the substantial abstractism from which it appears the artist has never deviated. Vito Sutto, June 2010